Press Release - Calling You Back To Me by Kelly Ording
Kelly Ording - Hope
Acrylic on canvas. 36 x 48 inches. 2025.
pt.2:
Calling You Back To Me
a solo exhibition by
Kelly Ording
Opening Reception
Saturday, September 13th at 6pm
On view until
October 26, 2025
pt.2 Gallery
1523b Webster St.
Oakland, CA 94612
pt. 2 Gallery is pleased to present Calling You Back To Me, a new body of work by Oakland-based artist Kelly Ording. This exhibition marks a departure in Ording’s practice: her first series shaped around a single, concept-driven narrative. For years, Ording’s paintings unfolded intuitively, each piece growing from a meditative process of repetition and discovery. Here, she sets herself boundaries—a unified palette and a singular concept—and pursues cohesion with exacting clarity.
The catalyst for this shift was an act of loss. After a break-in at her home, Ording’s emerald ring, an heirloom with deep family significance, was stolen, along with other pieces of her family’s history. The stone had been found by her uncle, a geologist in Colombia, who had it made into rings for his mother and sisters. Passed down to Ording by her own mother, the emerald became her most treasured possession: worn at her wedding and on every special occasion since. Its theft was not just material but emotional, carrying with it a rupture in family memory and lineage.
Kelly Ording - Monsoon of Me
Acrylic on canvas. 36 x 48 inches. 2025.
In its absence, Ording began to think of painting as invocation: works that could serve as prayers, as offerings. Yet rather than clinging to the hope of recovery, she redirected her energy into the paintings themselves. Each mark became a release, an acceptance that what was taken may never return.
In Greek mythology, Persephone’s descent into the underworld and cyclical return to earth symbolized absence and renewal, mourned and prayed for by her mother Demeter. Ording’s paintings similarly hold both longing and release. Through radiating linework and reverberating patterns, she transforms grief into ritual. The green palette, drawn from the lost emerald, anchors the works in memory while expanding their symbolic reach. The series also became an exploration of emerald itself—pairing it with shifting hues and subtle tonal variations, learning how the smallest changes recalibrate its presence. In this way, color became a form of study, devotion, and discovery all at once.
While previous exhibitions incorporated landscapes, typography, and knot-like forms, these paintings strip down to repetition and rhythm. Radiating lines overlap and split, suggesting reverberations, echoes, or sound waves. Their meditative intensity points both inward and outward—private prayers made public, structured through Ording’s rigorous draftsmanship.
Kelly Ording - The Pond
Acrylic on paper. 26 x 34 inches unframed . Being framed in a white faced, maple side, round corner frame. 2025.
With Calling You Back To Me, Ording opens a new chapter in her practice. The exhibition is at once the most personal and most experimental of her career, holding space for absence, ritual, and release. In these works, what was taken becomes transformed—loss dissolves into rhythm, and repetition itself becomes a way forward.
Based in Oakland, California, Kelly Ording has exhibited her work both in the U.S. and internationally since graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000. Her work is included in several collections, such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Arts Commission Public and Civic Art Collection, the U.S. Art in the Embassies Program, JP Morgan Chase, Ellie Mae, and Microsoft. Ording is represented by pt. 2 Gallery, Oakland, CA, and has recently exhibited with Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Gilman Contemporary, Sun Valley, ID; and Stephanie Chefas Projects, Portland, OR.
In addition to her works on paper, canvas, and collages, Ording has created several large-scale public works and murals. Her murals can be seen in San Francisco’s landmark Clarion Alley, Unity Plaza in San Francisco, Genentech, the Emeryville Center for Community Life, as well as other locations throughout the Bay Area and internationally. She has completed residencies at Google, Mountain View; the Facebook Analog Research Laboratory, Menlo Park; and Kala Art Institute, Berkeley. She was the recipient of the Sustainable Arts Foundation Award as well as the 2020 Kala Art Institute Master Artists Award. Ording’s first monograph, LOVE LETTERS, was published in 2025 by Land and Sea.