Rachel received her MFA from The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis, MO. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she paints and teaches.

Rachel works primarily from observation; making intimate portraits of inanimate objects in oil paint. She is interested in juxtaposing decorative aesthetics with difficult realities. Her work is full of notions of representation; kitsch, horror, humor, and metaphor.

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“Kalman’s fondness for totally useless, mass produced, decorative objects has become one of the pivotal elements in [her work]. Referencing the dead game animals often depicted in the still life genre, these animals are stiff, unchanging, and immobile, a different kind of dead. Representative of the human tendency to focus on frivolous detail in the face of complex and catastrophic times, these kitsch objects unblinkingly stand by as the world becomes unhinged.”

– TaVee McAllister Lee, Transmission Gallery