A conversation with Kylie McConnell and Riley Rouse on their recent exhibition, Keepsake, at Holsum Gallery in KC.

Riley Rouse, Treasure 1. All images credit to Zane Smith.

Bread tabs—those things that gather the end of a plastic bag of bread—I found one stuck to my sock after wandering around someone else’s kitchen. I keep locating them on countertops. They are everywhere at my girlfriend’s businesses (I mean, they are shops which offer sandwiches). Somehow, they end up anywhere but in the trash. The uniquely functionable shape is endearing. If I were at home, most likely I would mindlessly toss it in a drawer. I know there is a whole bin of these at one of those stores that sells scraps to artists (I frequent it). The bread tab is a curio frequently accidentally held on to. Seeing it as a ceramic sculpture, bloated and in a periwinkle glaze, was strikingly elegant. Made by Kansas City artist Riley Rouse, Bread Tab was recently the star of a two-person show titled, Keepsake, featuring Rouse’s work alongside another KC artist, Kylie McConnell.

From left to right: Kylie McConnell, *Sticker Shock*, Riley Rouse, *Carabiner,* McConnell, Hit Clip: *I Can't Wait (Remix)*, Rouse, *Treasure 1*, McConnell, *Shorty, you're my angel, you're my darling angel*.

I called up McConnell via FaceTime December 17, 2025 to see the show virtually. I sent follow-up questions via email to Rouse, who was unable to attend. The connection was pretty stable, though seeing the work in person would have been ideal. Nonetheless, McConnell and I, best friends during our time in the painting department at Kansas City Art Institute, quickly unraveled our lives post art-school and took a trip back to a girlhood we remember. In the case of these two artists, the objects perpetually hanging out in shoeboxes under beds make it out, recreated in a scale meant for display. Time and material collide in the artistic process.

I simply began the conversation asking how the pair came together. McConnell jokingly shared with me that Riley initially approached her looking for “background art.” I imagine a pop star finding their backup dancers. In all seriousness, though, Rouse was endeared by a work she had seen by McConnell of a Password Journal.

Riley Rouse: I was offered a show by Garry Noland at the Holsum Gallery without him seeing any of my work or even knowing if I was actively working on something (which I wasn't).

The thought of showing work sight unseen became a tantalizing premise for a reality television show. It turns out the show wasn’t so risky; Noland employed Rouse for various jobs over the past few years and is familiar with her work, which she acknowledges:

RR: It is kinda a nod at how artist spaces run by artists are more accessible and welcoming…

There is something carefree and unpretentious about the arrangements of exhibitions at Holsum, having visited myself many times and discussing with Noland the process of finding art to share space with him.

RR: This offer was back in May and I decided to accept it, hoping I had enough time to grasp a concept. A few months rolled by and I had begun creating large scale ceramic objects (the lighter, bread tab, push pin), and though I was enjoying it, I was still unsure how these pieces were going to exist in a show. I visited Holsum open studios where I chatted with Kylie about her My Password Journal painting and we bonded over nostalgic objects and brands of our childhoods. That is when I asked her if she would be interested in having a show with me.

I thought, of course, that was the last thing she had touched. Knowing McConnell’s partiality to accumulate dated, vibrant, funky toy-like objects, it makes sense. Fixating on the gesture of a scribble, in these ten iterations she recreated the scribble as an object, larger in scale and lathered with material, layering from graphite to Sharpie to paint. She then proceeds to hand-cut the negative space. She relents that she is an “idiot” for this decision.

KM: I don't want to ever do it again because I feel like I got, like, carpal tunnel or something, but it really looks cool!

From left to right: Kylie McConnell, *Girl Tech*, *Momentum*, *Ribs.*

She describes that it is the implication of concealment that drew her to replicate it. There are variations of the concealment that lean towards revealment at times, lyrics from Lorde’s song, Ribs, which the artist wrote at sixteen, can be seen beneath a rather open scribble. The Password Journal of any tween during this era very likely contains the young existential scribbling of realizations like, “it feels so scary getting old.” McConnell’s dimensional scribbling is a dramatic conception of the fraction of time it takes to conceal an embarrassing confession. Plenty of silly, insignificant sayings are scribbled into these adolescent journals. A parallel reality unfolds in Rouse’s work. She tells me:

RR: My ceramic work often revolves around the idea of preserving or memorializing objects that, on the surface, might seem insignificant or even unnecessary... like the bread tab or zebra key.

KM: The Password Journal is a little bit obvious, on the nose, like teenage girlhood, but the whole show has it.

She pans to the ceramic lighter by Rouse next to My Password Journal by McConnell,

[Riley] titled this lighter, It's for candles, like, when you were in your bedroom, and your mom finds a lighter and you say, “oh, it’s for candles– it's, like, for a birthday cake!”

Like, duh.

She continues to take me around the gallery, pointing out Rouses objects: a weighty zebra key, a padlock with a sheen like mylar, and a carabiner to match it, loaded with stringy keychains. There is even a bread tab charm.

JM: Talk about that carabiner.

KM: We were reminiscing on the humor of, like, when you're younger and you have all of these little objects…she has a carabiner, but she’s not driving anywhere! You have all of these colorful keys and it's maybe for like your bike lock or a side drawer. In reality, you maybe have one house key.

Kylie McConnell, *Hit Clip: I Can't Wait (Remix)* and Riley Rouse, *Carabiner.*

McConnell and Rouse reminisce about going on vacations and collecting keychains, or needing a place to put multiple friendship bracelets. The carabiner is an object of performance; it (literally) carries many implications. I remember Chloe Chaisson’s version in a recent show at the Dallas Contemporary. Instead of the more mature adornments a gay woman may have on her highly-capable carabiner, this one represents a more flashy and flimsy one, decorated with dainty ceramic charms and a Hilary Duff Hit Clip™. Remember those? The sensational Y2K microchips hold only the most iconic 60 seconds of one iconic teen pop song of the time; an absurdly influential way to listen to music. The sensation lives on for the connoisseurs of Y2K gadgets. McConnell constructed this replica scaled up 144 times the original size, complete with a microchip—more like, macrochip.

On FaceTime she shows me her reference to an actual Hit Clip she carries around. McConnell utilizes the process of photo transferring to achieve another layer of believability in the age of this relic, blurring the image and distorting the color. She tells Informality she wanted to experiment with material in ways she didn't while in art school.

KM: Is it fucked up that it's just a photo transfer? Do I have to paint on top of it?...That piece (Shorty, you're my angel, you're my darling, angel) has paint on it, and colored pencil, but minimal… I'm thinking… how much do you have to touch a piece for it to be done, [or] worthy?

Kylie McConnell, *Shorty, you’re my angel, you’re my darling, angel.*

…And there is a lot to it, right? The photo transfer is a lot. There's a quickness and a slowness ‘cause, it's like, I'm printing out an image, but I'm also searching for the image, finding the right one, and then that photo transfer can be kind of delicate, and there's a lot of rubbing she laughs. So, it takes time.

McConnell acknowledges she left the timestamp for making ceramic work a bit unconsidered at first. The involvement necessary to complete work in each other’s mediums had similar cadences and risks. I asked Rouse about this:

JM: When yours and Kylie's works came together, how did the relationship between the works evolve? Was the collaboration happening while the work was being made, or were you making new work independently and then finding ways to weave them together?

RR: From the beginning we were both headed in the direction of nostalgia and knew we wanted the install to be collaborative. Kylie started out with the Password Journal and I the lighter. From there I began creating more objects that sparked joy for me or were maybe even challenging to make in terms of form. Our work was made independently while keeping in mind what the other was working on. Kylie and I would meet up every other week to check on each other's projects all while trying to come up with a title for the show. Once we decided on the title Keepsake things began to fall in place for me. It allowed me to find a place for these odd mundane objects to live.

I found our collaborative installations to be the most successful in the show. The carabiner, parachute, and padlock were all touch points of collaboration and seemed to receive the most engagement.

There were lengthy processes in wielding these insignificant objects as significant. Speed and restraint work in tandem with one another to preserve these oddities and craft the tween nostalgia of the 2000’s. It could be a piece of literal trash that ends up in the box under our bed because it provides that rememberance, and these artists said, let’s recreate that, bigger. There are some executions of this idea I don't find to be as strong as some of the ones mentioned thus far.

Girl Tech, Momentum, Ribs, , That's Hot, Scribble Slate,Treasure 2, $300 Treasure 3, $150 Sisters not twins,

This is what you see in the first nook of the gallery outside of Noland’s studio/gallery, in a common space McConnell tells Informality is not always utilized. I find the scribbles from this distance are too few and too disjointed from the hand crafted pieces surrounding it. What is redeeming is the implied animation of these crispy neon scribbles, like they were escaping the Scribble Slates nearby. However, they are a little too crisp to exist in the same world as that ghostly Scribble Slate. Some objects made by Rouse gather around a couple cinder blocks holding down ropes that guide the viewer's curiosity to the otherside of the wall. Spoiler alert, they lead to two lenticular prints, the first of their kind made by McConnell. I don’t understand why half of a butterfly hair clip, bottle cap, and button are having a meeting around the cinder block, and not walking into a bar together, or something.

I do love the use of that space to create that peculiar installation of objects spanning either side of that wall; I do love that the objects are connected to each other physically, with a playful rope called a paracord that matches the primary colors of the works it is attached to. Via iPhone I am taken around the lenticular prints that are McConnell’s contribution to Parachute. I feel as though I am watching a home video on a kind of fucked up VHS, obscuring the image of a toddler running. There is noticeable residue on the surface of the work and I like the grunge of that. I can make out portions of the scene enough to place myself in this memory, having had adjacent experiences. Shit, I had one with McConnell our Sophomore year of college, under a parachute on the lawn, with no recollection of the context surrounding that memory.

Even knowing McConnell more personally, I don’t immediately recognize whose work is whose, an intention they both set and I find to be successful. Their language of touch intermingles effortlessly. The work is silly and carefree. The titles make me giggle and remind me of my overwhelming ability to see significance in the clutter. This high effort, playground-type art on the nostalgia of girlhood is both untangling memory through objects and tangling them up in the excessive fodder of these “keepsakes,” like the dance of items in a junk drawer.

For the Sake of Keeping

A conversation with Kylie McConnell and Riley Rouse on their recent exhibition, Keepsake, at Holsum Gallery in KC.

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