Press: Magazine Profile on K.I.A. (Kirby Andersen) art - Weatherworks, The Window, paintings, installations and sculptures

Spencer Magazine (Matthew Modine cover) did a 25+ profile on the Weatherworks land art, The Window photo series, the CRISPR paintings, and recombinant sculptures and installations of K.I.A. (Click the link to order the digital or hardcopy versions.)

The volumetric CRISPR painting series (various sizes), “genetically modified” works

The Window, a 24/7/365 durational photo series of unstaged ephemeral photos, interlinked sets of narratives nested in a single portrait of the times (covering the humanity, hilarity, precocity, vanity of the 21st century through race, religion, wealth, fashion, technology, love, hate, and fights and fires…) Read about them at the K.I.A. Substack HERE

More at at Spencer Magazine HERE (hardcover coffee-table editions available too)

Press: Weather artworks by K.I.A. (Kirby Andersen)

Full-page feature in The Toronto Star on the huge weather works series. See various years in the series HERE. PRINTS HERE. INQUIRIES HERE

Link to the Toronto Star article featuring the art made with weather by K.I.A.: LINK

2025 Weatherworks, L-R: dry snow, skied snow, rain, and ice

Compilation of various years in the Weatherworks series by K.I.A.

Black and whites from 2015 (ash on snow) in the Weatherworks series

ABOVE: ‘IOTA”, a painting (acrylic on archival paper) made outdoor with weather as a single work made of 36 single works, to be distributed (decentralized) to collectors around the globe and re-exhibited collectively every 10 years. MORE ABOUT HERE

ABOVE: Weatherwork paintings (acrylic on raw canvas) created outdoors using weather (found wind, topography, flora). More about this series by K.I.A. here: Weatherwork Canvases

Other artworks by K.I.A. (Kirby Andersen); CRIPSPR paintings, 24/7/361/1 photo series “The Window”, recombinant installations & sculptures, genetically modified paintings, large abstracts on canvas, public art explorations, etc. (see Menu). Works hang in various private and corporate collections (investment fund, law firm, yacht, homes, condos, mansions) in the USA, Canada, Japan, Italy, England, etc…

The Window: Fire

Fifty foot flames. Fire in the city. Coming soon to “The Window” photo series by K.I.A. (This would be the third fire in the series; townhomes, a truck, an apartment).

6 alarm fire destroys six townhomes in Yorkville (downtown Toronto).

tulips to crypto (cash fetish)

(bags, shoes, bins, & bits of money)

Commodities that had intrinsic value like grain, livestock, salt (Roman Empire), shells (Africa and Asia), and raw gold were the earliest form of money, used about 5000 years ago. Coins were first minted about 2500 years after that (in what is now Turkey) and made of electrum, a natural alloy of silver and gold.

A few hundred years after that China invented paper money, (around the same time as moveable type, see the last post), which became widely used around the 10th century. (Europe didn’t use paper money for another 600 years).

Sneaker-dealers speculate on limited edition runs of hype shoes. Provenance and condition for them are just as important as it is for high-end art. Shoe aficionados use insider jargon like “very near deadstock,” which refers to sneakers that are barely worn. I watched the buyer on the right inspect, for about 15 minutes, the treads, laces, insoles, and even the tissue in the box. (I was surprised he didn’t pull out an Air Jordan© jeweller’s loupe). The thick-soled thicc-soled shoes (by satanist Rick Owens) worn by the guy in the image below retailed new for $1000; on the resale market a year later, $4000+ . (If unworn. Never. Wear. The. Shoes). Limited edition sneakers are very hard to understand.

Paper money was always backed by gold, all the way up to the 1970s, when the US decoupled from it, turning the US dollar into a fiat currency (backed only by the “full faith and credit” of the government, not by precious metal reserves).

Fashion is backed by the full faith and credit of the consumer. Bathing Ape (above) is a Japanese streetwear company. To get their most-coveted limited edition clothes you have to first own a BAPE NFT. An NFT is a non-fungible token, which is basically a visual digital asset, like a jpeg of a funky Ape (as with crypto, the NFT’s blockchain code creates scarcity and provenance). You buy an NFT using a digital currency like Bitcoin. (Bitcoin is not backed by gold; nor by the full faith and credit of any government).

Bitcoin was first mined (not minted) in 2009. In 2010, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz made the first real-world purchase using crypto. He bought two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins, at the time the equivalent of $41 in real cash. Bitcoin is not just a currency, it is also a stock. Somehow. You are not supposed to spend it, just invest in it, and hold on to it for dear life. Had Lazlo HODLed, that $41 dollars of Bitcoin today would be worth over a billion old-fashioned dollars — $1,027,379,668.16 USD to be exact, depending on when you are reading this. That’s more than 50 million pizzas. Crypto is hard to understand.

Weatherwork 2025 by K.I.A.

WEATHERWORKS BY K.I.A. 2025

Sneak peak at this year’s weatherwork - land art installation made on snow using wind, ice, water, rain. Showing more of the process for this season… 4 iterations of the work, for the first time: snow, wet snow, rain, and then frozen under a layer of ice. Walked, skied, and skated…(Sets of prints will be available).

SEE MORE OF 2025 WEATHERWORK HERE

Previous seasons can be seen HERE

earthling's signalings (The Window pt 60 by K.I.A.)

Signs (banners, flags, trucks and tees) of the times (Part 2 HERE):

Earthlings then

women raptors pornstars men

compare yourself to the person
bruised never broken

you were yesterday matters state
status because of take

yeehaw my country you know
changed my life where to will you go

FOR THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND THE “FOUND TEXT” POEM “EARTHLINGS SIGNALINGS” SEE THE K.I.A. SUBSTACK HERE

SEE ALL 65+ OF “THE WINDOW” SETS AT THE SUBSTACK

One-frame Films (The Window by K.I.A., pt 59)

Titled Film Stills” series*:

“Arson, Incorporated”

“The Accidenter”

“Dazzle, Hero!” **

TO SEE THE REST OF THE “One Frame Movie” IMAGES IN THIS SERIES, (FOR TITLES/TEXT BELOW), SEE THE SUBSTACK SERIES on “THE WINDOW” HERE: LINK

“Assassin, Bikini, Cuccinelli”

“Two Clones Grown (One Gone)”

“Steven Dies Seven Times”

“Rock Paper Flowers”

“Hello, Halo”

“Wait When’s Payday?”

“The Last Temptation of Chris”

“The Second Last Temptation of Chris”

NOTES:

  • * artist Cindy Sherman’s first major photo series (1977-80, and acquired in 1995 by MoMA) was entitled “Untitled Film Stills”, where she staged herself in various stereotypical female lead roles (bombshell, fashion victim, schoolgirl and so on). In each of the seventy photographs her characters seem to be caught mid-narrative, just before or after an important event, and, just as in the movies, they never look directly at the camera ****

  • Sherman didn’t title her “films” because it would ruin their ambiguity (even though the photos are carefully staged with costuming and settings chosen to refer to existing films or genres, and are specific statements or critiques about culture and identity). The Window “films” above, because they are unstaged —they are real, ephemeral found moments — are titled to make them fictional and (even more) ambiguous as narratives, observations, or critiques. The subjects, unaware of the camera, also never break the fourth-wall (look directly at the viewer/photographer).

  • “The Accidenter” above is kinda like M. Night Shyalaman’s movie “Glass”, because three different characters show up in the one pic. The man to the left who is painting, the man bottom left holding the cardboard sign up, and the man on the ground at right have all starred in their own photos, i.e. sign man from Protest/Antitest.

  • Also “The Accidenter” is unlike “Glass” because Rotten Tomatoes reviewers like CelIn D couldn’t realistically say of the single frame “Too long, at any length”.

  • Tagline for “2 Clones Grown, 1 Gone”: Me, Myself, and A.I. Tag for “Wait When’s Payday?”: Always the bride, never the bridesmaid and for “Hello, Halo”: Heaven, we have a problem

  • Titlelists, aka professional movie-namers, can make — for coming up with great titles like “Back to the Future”— between $250,000 and $413,000 a year.

  • “Pacific Air Flight 121” was a very vanilla title that got changed to the very visual and visceral “Snakes on a Plane”. The movie flopped. When a team of marketing specialists were analyzing its financial failure, someone in their focus-group responded “Great title! When I read it I saw the entire movie in my head.” When asked why he then didn’t go on to experience it in the theatre, he answered “It wasn’t worth seeing a second time”. Samuel Jackson, who had suggested the title change, had to give back the $413,000 bonus he had negotiated.

  • The movie with the longest title (according to the GBOWR***) is: “The Sundevil and the Dragonmaker With Halo Duress Use Giant Sorcery, Magyck, and Dark Shroud To Turn Offensive Utopia Into an Eternal Burn, Part Two” (148 characters). Gary Busey came up with the title spontaneously (and sans bonus) when talking at the producer, insisting that the title needed to be too long to fit on a marquee. (The movie turned a minor profit, primarily from DVD sales in Norway).

  • Movies are often retitled for overseas markets. For example “Zootopia” was radically renamed for the UK market, and called “Zootropolis”.

  • ** US re-title of the hit Japanese movie “Power Man, Dazzle Stand!”

  • In Norway, the Sundevil movie was retitled “Sundevil og Dragonmaker Med Thor Bruker Gigantiske Trolldom, Magyck og Mørkt Likklede For å Gjøre Offensiv Utopia Til en Evig Forbrenning, Del To”. The local profesjonell tittelist made the full 4,574,149.95 kroner that year (4,317,000.93 of it because he snikja’d “Thor” into the title, which significantly boosted DVD sales, especially in Svalbard.)

  • “Untitled” was the original title for “Almost Famous”

  • *** Guinness Book of World Records Gary Busey Owns Word Records

  • After hearing about Samuel Jackson’s near-bonus, Gary Busey devoted the entire seventh chapter of his third biography to what he thought the title for “Snakes on a Plane” should have been. The chapter starts with: Snakes on a Plane should have been called and ends about 150 marquees-worth pages later. Had that sesquipedalian title been used, he would have gotten into both the GBOWR and the GBOWR. Busey has yet to be hired as a Titleist. He has, however, started writing his fourth biography. (The seventh, eight, and ninth chapters of which will be about what CelIn D should have included in their RT review of “Glass”).

  • the first found film series photos from The Window, including the box-office hit “Vampires VS IV”, Palm d’Or winner “Annie May”, and Razzie-awardee “Angel Raguel”, can all be seen here: LINK . All of the characters are caught just before, or after, a narrative event, and none of them (alien bride, cam girl, angel etc) look at the camera.

  • didactic panel: All photos in The Window series (unlike Sherman) are unstaged, shot 24/7/365/1 (single location), eventually grouped in sets as themed visual poems (w/ retinal rhymes), and ultimately interconnected as a recombinant installation explained in didactic panels.

  • *****

    Sets, L to R: Crosswalk I, Singing Pi, Horses They Fly, What’s the Point, Crosswalk II, How Far the Man

BONUS IMAGE:

****Untitled Film Still #71

NSA Keyword Poem: Deadbeef Atomicraft (Immaculate Constellation tee shirt edit)

New limited edition wearable artwork: a wordwork by K.I.A., a poem using only top secret keywords used by the CIA, NSA, (and so on), on the below (numbered) t-shirt. Guaranteed to start a discussion. Or a rendition. Or an abduction.

click to go to store

DEADBEEF ATOMICRAFT  KH-11

The chameleon man, the alchemist,
the eternity server, a mole;
with visionquest, by retinal fetish,
a scanner of the keyhole

Spies not daisy, iris, hollyhock, or rose,
but something maverick (or from the Weekly World News),
unclassified, anonymous, explicit, rogue,
veiled forthcoming but with an unlimited view

Pornstars plus ninja on calliope indigo,
(with a dazzler predator debugging the concerto)
a cowboy, redheads, and a sharpshooter with a glock,
and in the sidemirror, an elf, a gorilla, and sphinx with a lock

Eavesdropping jazz jargon and pinknoise passwords,
he flashbangs a merlin -- phreaking XS4all,
ramjets past  jupiter, then a megastar, and at last bursts
through diamondchips and galaxydust to breach nightfall...

There, in sugargrove sweetdreams to see
reddawn & bluesky crystallize a white sea
but suddenly, to stun, comes temblor, whirlpool, tsunami,
to scissor inspiration, sing disaster sagacity

Comes a crazytrain babblequest conundrum,
and thinkchew thunderweb doublevision,
no noblequest just atomicraft, warstock bullion
of immaculate constellation

Then the virus messiah — the tarot card reveal
deadbeef frozentundra, a blizzard,
a blacksnake in firelake with the 777 seal,
in derby hat with third chance, a mockingbird

The Sundevil, the Dragonmaker, with halo duress
white giant sorcery, in blackflesh,
using magyck and darkshroud, all trojan, to turn
offensive utopia into a chemical burn.

NOTE: The poem, now in quatrains (cuz Nostradamus), has been edited to include the latest UFO / UAP secret project name recently revealed by a whistleblower, and the rhyme tightened. The original poem appears in this painting (which also contains Area 51 landing-strip map, blueprints for a listening device bug, and digital camouflage patterns), more about HERE:

up the long slide (even jack black)

TL; DR: below the surface & to the sun (Verticality, Part Two, by K.I.A.)

The original Verticality” image arrangement (post) became concrete because of a synchronicity. I’d selected a series of photos of ephemeral moments — of disparate content, and taken with separate intents — which were captured over the course of a year, and then grouped them by elevation (how far the subject was from the ground). A vertical visual poem.

Just after I’d curated that grouping, by chance, I came across the poem “High Windows” by Philip Larkin. Here’s its last stanza:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

The poem’s last stanza resonates with the themes of The Window (continuity, infinity, with hints perhaps of both despair and transcendence… ). And, of course, the main hook was that all the photos in this series (of series) are, literally, taken from a high window.

So I used the poem as the connecting thread for that first post some time ago, but for a while now I’ve wanted to do a Verticality sequel. (Or… or maybe a franchise, at some point merchandising the IP with toys, maybe a gin or a tequila line, and possibly a cologne or a perfume — with signature top notes of transcendence, and base notes of despair). But I’ve held off for dittophobia.

Then a few days ago, out of nowhere, this famous line popped into my head:

SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND READ MORE (SUBSCRIBE!) AT THE K.I.A. SUBSSTACK HERE

All The Hills Echo Ha Ha He He (The Window by K.I.A. pt 54)

An angst-antidote — excerpts from Songs of Innocence by William Blake, paired with images from The Window photo installation series:

Merry, merry sparrow!/Under leaves so green/A happy blossom/Sees you, swift as arrow,/Seek your cradle narrow, /Near my bosom

-THE BLOSSOM

Pretty joy! / Sweet joy, but two days old. / Sweet joy I call thee: / Thou dost smile, / I sing the while; / Sweet joy befall thee!
-JOY

When the meadows laugh with lively green, / And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene; / When Mary and Susan and Emily / With their sweet round mouths sing ‘Ha ha he!
-THE LAUGHING SONG

AI FOR AN EYE

TL; DR: cans and can’ts of text photography, censorship, and leg numeracy

(All images in this post available as signed and numbered prints, contact.)

Polymelia Man by K.I.A.

A dog wearing sunglasses is apparently so dangerous that some text-to-image A.I.’s won’t let you generate one due to their guidelines. So too a glass of champagne, at least when the prompt is “An older woman walking a dog in a stroller which has an attached basket with a champagne glass in it, and the dog is wearing sunglasses”. (For what nefarious reasons would you even ask to generate that, you may inquire? I mean, if you wanted to make something reallydisturbing, you’d request something like “a man wearing a cat on his shoulder like a parrot*”). The very same artificial intelligence’s safety-ism didn’t stop the image creation (above) of “a man in costume with a cane, on a brick sidewalk, photographed from above”… but then on its own dark whim the AI added a frightening — some might suggest nefarious — third leg on the fellow.

The Window image 4164 by K.I.A.

A skeleton hand was also OK to AI into a dumpster, but a handgun and dildo got a guideline warning and were not generated. “WARNING: some words do not match our guidelines and have been removed”:

“In his house at R'lyeh, dead cthulhu waits dreaming to move” by K.I.A. and K.A.I.

Text-to-image Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft’s ancient octopus-headed demon (who Wiki says is a “source of constant subconscious anxiety for all mankind”, and whose worshippers practice loathsome rituals), got an enthusiastic aye-aye from the AI, so below I am able to show you the Great Old One (at least as seen on the side of his her their new endeavour, a zero-carbon-emission** moving-van franchise):

I had to include some text photography for this series, since The Window project is kinda meta, and has touched upon many types of photography — appropriation, surveillance, rephotography, camera obscura, motion capture, Polaroid composites, etc., and the writing has name-checked various lens-based artists, from Adams to Bresson to Maier to Tilmans to Wall…

So as long as I used real The Window photographs as generation-reference (i.e. the Cthulhu image above uses an actual photo from the “U-Haul Psalms” series), it technically doesn’t break my 1 rule: all shots in the 24/7/365 project must be taken from a single location. (The text photography in this post’s grouping is also a type of “Artist steal thyself”, as it uses from scratch my own images and words, which is more interesting than sampling OPA — other people’s art — as inspiration, homage, outright theft, or via AI)…

TO SEE & READ THE REST OF THE POST “AI FOR AN EYE” , GO TO THE SUBSTACK: CLICK HERE

What's the Point?

(imperative, declarative and metonymic oh my!)

TL; DR: just see the point(s)

Humans learn to point around 15 months of age (related to language development), first using their whole hand, then, three months later, by extending their index finger. Infants first do imperative pointing (i.e. to ask for a toy too far away or a sweet they want), and declarative pointing, (i.e. to indicate something new or interesting, like a dog entering the room.)

Animals don’t point. This includes mammals with fingers, like simians. However, even though they don’t point in the wild, when in captivity gorillas and chimpanzees learn how to do it from humans. Dogs understand pointing (from thousands of years of interacting with people — cats, also domesticated, just can’t be bothered), as do dolphins (perhaps because their echolocation “beam” is a sonic type of pointing).

There are numerous ways of pointing: semiotic primitive; pseudo-pointing; syntactic; cross-species litmus test… (see “Fifteen Ways of Looking at a Pointing Gesture” by Kensy Cooperrider for more of them.) Metonymic pointing is where you use the gesture to draw attention to an abstract concept — for example, a stressed staffer points to their watch to signal to the malapropping President answering questions it’s time to go; a heartless developer points to your home to indicate a proposed subway and condominium development… ):

Pointing can be difficult to interpret — for example, if you are wordlessly communicating with a person who doesn’t speak your language and you point to an apple, are you drawing attention to its color, its shape, your hunger? If you point to it three times, are you indicating a different attribute each time?

SEE THE REST OF THE “POINTING” SET, W/TEXT, HERE: https://nu4ya.substack.com

Nuns to Gnostics (Buddha, Baphomet, Jah, Jesus, Yahweh, Waheguru... ) The Window pt. 51 by K.I.A.

All the below so close (within a 15’ area), and not so far apart.

On the autumnal equinox the woman above and five others danced through the streets at sunset, wearing flower crowns, celebrating Mabon (“The Witch’s Thanksgiving”) in honour of nature’s abundance.

May good thoughts come to us from all sides”, a Hindu prayer.

A Sikh principle is sarbat da bhala (“the welfare of all” or “may everyone prosper”)

This woman is going to a Powwow (an Indigenous gathering to celebrate culture, tell stories, sing, and perform traditional dances) somewhere downtown. On her regalia is the circular Four Directions symbol (white N, red S, yellow E, black W), one meaning of which is the interdependent relationship between all living things.

The tefillin is a small black box containing verses from the Torah, worn by Orthodox and traditional communities by wrapping the attached leather straps around the arm and forehead. The purpose is to keep one’s focus on spiritual development, not worldly desires.

An Apostle …...

READ AND SEE MORE ABOUT THIS SET OF IMAGES FROM THE WINDOW AT: SUBSTACK (and subscribe and share!)

Get the entire Nuns to Gnostics set HERE (and other sets HERE)

The Window as “networked” installation showing complex connections across images, time, people…

heart cave in (so much beauty in the world)

“I need to remember … Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.” — Ricky Fitts (American Beauty, plastic bag scene)

objectifying, fetishizing, aesthetizing, anesthetizing, romanticizing, othering, ignoring, apotheosizing, burlesquing, proselytizing presenting


Image 1
and final bookend image (14): Garbage Truck in Blue and Red taken 3 am, with found lighting from a strobing ambulance attending a close-by calamity

This post’s haiku:

white specks of snow fall
black bag shiny wrinkled worn
man wears to keep warm

Some bottles throughout art history: Roderick O’Conner (Still Life With Bottles), Cezanne (Still Life With Peppermint Bottle), Warhol (Green Coca-Cola Bottles), Ai Wei Wei’s Untitled 1993 (Song dynasty sculpture inside a whiskey bottle), and er, Jeff Koons’ Dom Perignon bottles (“some of the most affordable Koons works on the market”)

Title: Still Life, With Bottles

Title - After A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Jeff Wall ((After Hokusai))

The nightclub at the back of the alley stashed their empty bottles in a former apartment below us (the building was being vacated for condo demolition); they weren’t officially paying rent for the space, so it didn’t have locks…

SEE THE REST OF THE SUBSTACK HERE (AND SUBSCRIBE!): LINK

Protest! Antitest!

Signs & Flags & Tees & Trucks of the times

FOUND WORD POEM:

We stand
as one — we will not comply;
from the river to the sea,
just say,
no, don’t believe the lies —
essential liberty,
hugs, temporarily blocked,
50% off,
can’t we just all get along
(subject to court injunction),
we will fight in the court. Hibachi

…cont’d at the link below

SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND POST AT THE K.I.A. ART SUBSTACK HERE

ᴉuʌǝɹsᴉou <-> inversion (a la Graham & because Baselitz)

TL; DR: if the sky were ground
(ʇɥǝ Mᴉupoʍ by K.I.A., p.50)

“New York City 1 (After Mondrian)”

For 75 years, the Mondrian painting “New York City I” (a grid of red, yellow, blue, and black linear adhesive tapes) was hung upside down. Research eventually proved that it should be shown the other way around. However, due to possible damage, the painting would continue to be displayed the wrong end up. “If you were to turn it upside down now, gravity would pull it into another direction. And it’s now part of the work’s story,” said curator Meyer-Büser in 2022. “Once I pointed it out to the other curators, we realised it was very obvious” (italics mine):

“New York City 1” (Mondrian): Left: right; Right: wrong

Georg Baselitz is famous for exhibiting his paintings upside-down — or rather, right-side up, but with the subject matter inverted — to create unease and/or to make the content more difficult to interpret. His first inverted painting was in 1969, “The Wood on Its Head”. Flipping a traditional landscape of a tree made the work overcome representation, its artificiality highlighted, and left-brain analysis of it disrupted. The subject of the art was not as important as the work’s visual insight. It is immediately obvious that the tree, or in later works, the human being, is not the right way up. Genius, or gimmick? Bravado, or branding?

"Untitled" (Baselitz) - "Titled" (K.I.A.)

Rodney Graham is well-known for his photographs of trees hung upside down. (This presentation method evolved from his use of camera obscura, where a pinhole in a wall is used to isolate and cast the image —upside down and reversed, because light travels in a straight line — at large scale onto a facing wall). Of these works Graham said I was also using a kind of readymade strategy based on the disputable assumption that a photograph is not art but an upside down photo is.

"Welsh Oaks #1" (Graham) - "City Trees Two" (K.I.A.)

Some of the photos for The Window project/portrait/installation were shot upside-down. This was due to: 1) mistake, 2) the need to see around an obscuring object, like overhead wires, 3) not wanting the subjects to change their behaviour as a result of noticing the photographer’s movements 4) wanting to stay alive. (Meaning sticking the camera out the window without looking in order to avoid stray bullets from shootings, prevent rocks thrown from drug dealers or molotov cocktails from motorcycle gangs, and not garner a deadly look from that socialite after she stole flowers from a planter).

These images would usually be re-oriented when editing… unless visually it would enable two or more simultaneous readings — that is, a perceptual shift: is the skater dropping down into the flowerbed as if descending from a balcony above, or across it, launched towards the bottom of the photo from a crash…

READ & SEE MORE about the “Inversion Set” from The Window by K.I.A. (& SUBSCRIBE) AT THE SUBSTACK HERE