Kenley Turner
Ghostgrl Studio
Kenley Turner is a mixed-media visual artist and musician born and raised in Dallas, Texas. There, she attended Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts to study and focus on guitar. Throughout her time there, she studied classical and contemporary guitar, played in several ensembles, and wrote original music. During this time, outside of school, she spent most of her time performing and in a rock band, she is a lead guitarist for, The Bombs! The immersive exposure to the arts she received at Booker T. Washington introduced Kenley to many performance Artists who combined music, performing, and visual art into a singular medium, which she became extremely interested in. From this point, she went on to study visual arts at Kansas City Art Institute and she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture. As of now, she lives as a working artist in Dallas, Texas as a working artist creating fashion, music, sculptures, and paintings as a means of world-building to promote imagination, self-expression, and personal liberation. She also is the studio manager at Oil and Cotton, a studio in Dallas that focuses on bringing art education to the community. 
Kenley's work explores the boundaries between tangible reality and ethereal realms of the subconscious, dreams, childhood memories, and the collective unconscious. Through her art, she challenges the notion that altered states of perception, whether through dreams, nostalgia, or imagination—are any less authentic than our everyday experiences. By distinguishing between these worlds, her work invites viewers to reconsider the nature of reality itself.
Her pieces position the viewer as the hero of a monomyth, evoking the existential journey of youth as they navigate liminal spaces between escapism and reality, innocence and self-awareness. These themes tap into something fundamental within us, raising questions about our relationship with the esoteric. By blending elements of mysticism and postmodernism, her work acts as a portal into a world that is a symbol of western collective subconscience.
Through a lens of capitalistic critique, Kenley examines the tension between reality and fantasy, questioning what is within our locus of control. In a world increasingly dictated by digital simulations and commodified dreams, her work asks whether escapism is an act of agency or a symptom of disenfranchisement.