Kelsey Wroten draws near something big

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Kelsey Wroten’s illustrations are easy to like and, increasingly, easy to spot. The 2015 Kansas City Art Institute graduate has already worked with brands such as Nike, Nickelodeon, DC Comics, Bitch magazine and Vice. (Also, full disclosure, she recently contributed an illustration to The Pitch.) Her characters, stylish and youthful, can sometimes appear bored, in an amusingly exaggerated way. Look closer, though, and there’s tenderness on display as well.

That tenderness comes through in the noncommercial art now on view in the intimate gallery at the back of Artist & Craftsman Supply. The works showcase Wroten’s broad appeal with a mere fraction of illustrations selected from what’s becoming a very productive studio practice.

Among the well-chosen samples here are images that dip into her work in longer narratives, particularly comics. In that medium, she paints women as contemporary badasses, vibrating with attitude as they charge down streets eating Doritos or ignoring texts from friends. These characters seem to share a mission: to be simultaneously loved and left alone. It’s an honest, self-aware portrayal of a generation — or a whole culture, take your pick — preoccupied with the craving first for one and then the other. Stilled in moments of reflection, rejection and rebellion, the women on Wroten’s gauche panels aren’t necessarily comfortable, yet they’re utterly unashamed. They flaunt pit hair and tattoos, indulge their languor, revel in their poor dietary choices. In these details, the artist shows us singular moments while making it easy to imagine the previous and the next events in her story lines.

Hanging from a clothesline to substitute for a second wall in the tiny gallery are fantasy and adventure illustrations, which hold nothing back as they reveal another facet of Wroten’s talent. Here, the relative kindness of her paintings is cast away in favor of otherworldly excess: dramatic scenarios in which characters, some of them not altogether humanoid, are poised on the cusp of action within a story arc. When you see a cowboy, gun at the ready, standing before a graveyard of fallen friends littered with empty bottles of booze, all that’s missing is the deep-voiced “In a world…” of a movie trailer.

The prints and paintings on display aren’t for every budget, but the show also includes plenty of Wroten’s zines. At $5 a copy, you can own a piece of this young artist’s thrilling imagination.