K.I.A.

K.I.A. ART: PRINTS PAINTINGS SCULPTURE/INSTALLATION PUBLIC ART+

PALIMPSEST ART: in painting, photography, installation, land art, sculpture…

Palimpsest photography project: The Window

Photography as palimpsest of time: “The Window” project by K.I.A., a 24/7/365/1 photo series —seen as a single portrait — capturing the diversity, beauty, and complexity of life in the 21st centurey. All images show multple events over the course of a year, at all hours of the day, from one “canvas”: the street below. (And some show one person over the course of that same time.) The background remains the same, overwritten daily by new subject matter. The Window: webpages LINK or substack Link : “Even within one photo different times are captured. A full lunar eclipse happens only once every 17 years or so. And… light from the moon takes 1.3 seconds to reach Earth, light from the Sun takes 8 minutes...”

Palimpsest Paintings 

“Palimpsestos” means “scraped again”; in ancient times when parchment was expensive to acquire or difficult to make, earlier writings would be scraped or washed off and the page overwritten.  Over time, you might have scientific writings on top of scraped religious writings which were on top of erased philisophical texts on top of washed off food inventories… going back decades, or sometimes even many hundreds of years, across a diversity of cultures, economies, and belief systems. (Modern technology like ultraviolet has enabled the reading of the layers.) On computer hard drives, information is being overwritten all the time.

My collages are vertically interleaved or stacked imagery (Y axis generally, but sometimes horizontally on the X), whereas these palimpsests are done on the Z axis (that is, overlayed on top of instead of above one another.) The palimpsest pieces also resonate with geology, where previous earth eras are revealed in layers as you dig down, deserts under lake beds under forests, but also civilization, with hidden histories beneath the surface, cities or cultural centers whose origin, and re-origin, goes back many thousands of years making definitive origns hard to determine (underscoring one of my overarching themes: we are all palimpsests). Here’s an example on my Substack of a palimpsest portrait, incorporating X & Y axis in space, and Z over time. [More CONT’D below…]

Another reference point is music: a palimpsest is contrapuntal.  Pop music like rock and pop are relatively simple, with one melodic line; more complex music (classical) has two or more melodic lines played simultaneously. When listening, you can track back and forth between the melodic lines; in a sense, you can get a different listening experience the next time by following the lines at different points.  So a palimpsest is contrapuntal, with separate but overlapping visual melodies and themes, which you can follow in many ways. This is an ongoing series of palimpsest paintings, layer upon layer of cross-cultural and multi-temporal text and imagery.

A new series has turned the palimpsest layers geological, stacking strata of layers of paintings atop one another. A number of the works use technology (laser cutting) to achieve some of the layers. Some of them have overwritten/overpainted layers (see Divination Inclination below), while some are earlier paintings that have been palimpsested multiple times with oilsticked layers, industrial coverings, stainless steel enveiling and so on. There is a crossover from series to series, as in the work floSteppa, which is a palimpsest of the linear abstracts, the industrial mirror-tape works, the wrapped pieces, and the shift/drift painting series. (In that sense the work belongs to the Evolvers series, which are long-vision works, changing as time goes on)

Knowing the code isn’t integral to enjoying the work, and sometimes the ineffable is better. But for those curious, see below:

Hear Her There She (aka No There, There)….

This work fuses the oilstick, collage and code works.
It's also transtemporal -- there is a complex bas-relief texture of a Victorian petit point motto that reveals beneath the 21st century material. (The reflective quality of which allows the colors in the room, or the viewer, to resolve/dissolve into the piece. It also creates a shifting or unstable optical appearance as one moves around the work, with the different textures or sections luminescing at different angles or time of day.)

The text reads "No Hear Hear, No There There", expanding on the Gertrude Stein quote about unreliable memory and perception of place, and emptiness, to include 'here/now' and not just 'then/there' ('Hear' aurally sounds as 'Here'). The mirror tape is utilized for another layer of the palimpsest, forming an abstracted digitalesque map of Oakland, GS's hometown. (Re: a map is not the territory, never is the actual place, like memory.)

No set Time. No concrete Place. And also, no set Meaning* -- interpretation of the phrase shifts when using a different sense -- one hears "Here" but sees "Hear", so the text can simultaneously be understood as  "No praise, No comfort" (no encouraging claps of "hear, hear" from the crowd, no comforting pats of "there there" from Mom.)

“Argent Silk Armor” (aka Ardent Silver Amour) 84” x 60 x 5”, oilstick on faceted aluminum.

Textiles from Japan, Africa, Victorian era Europe, and a North American Indigenous breastplate, overlayed. The bends in the aluminum are the folds used on a kimono for storing.

Loom Code (aka Pretty Rainbow Over Farm)

A glorious double-rainbow captured over a beautiful country farm, as information.

The photo was translated via email (by a helpful textile company located in the eastern-bloc) into extensive Jacquard-card code. The thousands of squares were then hand-drawn/scratched/sanded/redrawn in many layers in metallic oilsticks on the curved aluminum. 

Jacquard cards were punch cards used in mechanical looms from the 1800s; they eventually led to the invention of computers. So this piece is part of a series using encoded information to explore the idea that there are other layers of reality behind what we physically see (but which a shift in perspective, knowledge, or consciousness can reveal.)

General Stealth, Car River 84 x 60”, oilstick on aluminum.

Tom Thomson x Emily Carr ÷ General Idea x Agnes Martin = genetically modified Canadian art.

A quadrandscape. Taking the forests of Thomson and splicing them with organic shapes of Carr over the t.v. bands of General Idea, and beneath the minimalist lines of Martin. There is a horizontal, as well as a vertical, tracking of light as the aluminum reflects with movement and illumination, contrasting the velvety matte of the oilstick.

“The Map is Not That”, 84” x 60”, oilstick on folded & distressed aluminum

Navigational and star charts, satellite shots, gps, glyphs and geography. Photons and suns. Flatness vs. vastness, circles against grids.  “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” -- maps (art) as abstraction of a reality that is not possible to accurately capture. A map can never be correct -- it would have to be the size of the land to be so... and even then, to be accurate, would have to include that map, and so on. Map as different from a mirror, or a window, but still not reality. “Real Housewives Of” is anything but that.

But sometimes... though the map is not the territory, the abstraction -- the poem, the painting --- can actually give truer insight (and reality can shadow.)

The substrate in this painting is bent like an unfolded map; concavities have been drilled into the many-layered colors, and they, along with the scored, scratched and sanded metal grids, luminesce as you move; silver light trails and sparkles highlighting/undermining the 2D/3D elements, and the matte of the medium.

“e dot tree dot” — 84 x 60, oilstick on aluminum

Walking through a a birch forest, it appeared as if the earth was pulsing out some kind of message — the blacks and whites of the trunks were like the dots and dashes of Morse code.

The morse-code lines (seen vertically) are phrases from an e. e. cummings poem that references nature (i.e. “when by now and tree by leaf”); the cursive lines at bottom are actually secretarial shorthand symbols, each representing a word from the poem (i.e “snow”), all fracturing a birch forest… (it runs parallel, like writing).

“NullPunk” 60” x 32” mixed media on aluminum

Highly detailed bas-relief texture, paint enlayered with zero-point toroids,  valence bonds, quantum dot arrays, electron envelopes, crystalline grids, atomic shells... and lightning bolts

Inspired by a dream where I was to “wave the grid”. (The dream image was of a fractal/organic shape forming over a 3D grid; feeling was that the grid was 20th century, the wave is 21st

“Sonnetshowerskin” 56 x 28” oilstick on aluminum tape on aluminum.

This work came from a dream where it was raining words. As each drop hit your skin you felt its meaning. A storm was Shakespearean, a shower haikus. A hurricane the library of Alexandria, lived in a deluge.

The bas-relief on this painting references weather systems and language, worlds formed from words.

Bas-relief texture of zero-point toroids,  valence bonds, quantum dot arrays, electron envelopes, crystalline grids, atomic shells... and lightning bolts.

Inspired by a dream where I was to “wave the grid”. (The dream image was of a fractal/organic shape forming over a 3D grid; feeling was that the grid was 20th century, the wave is 21st).

“Deadbeef Atomicraft” 57” x 36” aluminum tape on aluminum

“using magyck & darkshroud, all trojan, to turn / offensive utopia into a chemical burn”

An NSA Poem. The words in the poem are taken from the NSA keyword list; use them in your emails or phone calls (or poems) and the National Security Agency will track you. Code-names of surveillance and other secret spy programs were also used.

Outside that lexicon, only ordinary conjunctions are used.

Woven around the stanzas is the image of a circuit-board for a listening device (a “bug”). Overlaying that are the landing strips of the airport at Area 51 (where they test drones and super-secret planes).  The final layer is a reference to camouflage, in this case the kind that has been designed by a computer algothrithm (and has rectilinear, not organic, shapes). All this done on a reflective surface: you are watched, as you look.

Here’s the poem:

DEADBEEF ATOMICRAFT  KH-11

The alchemist, chameleon man,  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 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 megastar, then quasar, and 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;
come crazytrain, babblequest,  and conundrum...
thinkchew, thunderweb, doublevision,
and immaculate constellation.
Then, the virus messiah --- the tarot card reveal ---
no noblequest, just  frozentundra, blizzard, the 777 seal:
blacksnake, warstock, firelake, and halo duress.

The  Sundevil , the Dragonmaker, with sorcery, in blackflesh,
using magyck & darkshroud, all trojan, to turn
offensive utopia into a chemical burn.

“Divination Inclination” 56 x 36, oilstick on aluminum

This work is a synthesis of many divination systems. 3000 bolts were painstakingly (emphasis on pain) arranged in a pattern formed from I-ching, kabbalah, and geomantic shapes, poking through colorful imagery from the Tarot deck and Rorschach blots, then scratched with tiny graffiti-like lines referencing automatic writing, then covered in white.

“Would Code” 24 x 18” colored pencil and charcoal on paper

Site-specific found patterns/code/information: vintage map, 1930’s player-piano roll, insect trail in wood.

A ‘landscape’... but not a drawing of the location, but a drawing of the data of the location. (Augmented reality, without the technology.) Ongoing series.

“Masaimatical” 10’ x 5’, acrylic on recombinant aluminum panels

A painting in the form of a Masai shield comprised of mathematical formulae and graphs.  Lines and curves from the math graphs replicate or echo the shapes on the shield. (I woke up from sleep with the painting fully formed in my head; it was a dream leap, not a logical linear trek to the idea. Glyphs, calligraphy, graffiti, heiroglyphs, symbols, crop circle shapes and other ‘shapes = data’ often show up in my work).

Maasai shields denote information about the holder — for example, a wavy line drawn on the front might mean that the bearer ‘lives near the river’. That same wavy line, however, would mean ‘y(t)=Asin(2πft+φ)ytAsin2πftφ’ to a mathematician (a sin wave function). This is the key to the work: a single shape that conveys very different sets of information across culture and time, to different people according to their background or experience. 

Palimpsest Sculpture/Installations:

The below sculptures function like a palimpsest in the sense that they start with an originating image and form that gets wiped or overwritten as time progresses and the work is transformed into new shapes that contain new meaning (just as a palimpsest has it’s ink scraped from the papyrus or canvas, and gets repeatedly written over with new data: the Pharoah’s wheat inventory, the architects formula, the census as the decades pass… each with different meaning using the same material.).

”Acceleration / Still”: A two-dimensional painting, hung three-dimensionally, to be reconfigured over time. (CLICK HERE TO READ MORE}

The initial image is a lepidoptera wing containing a collage of hundreds of aircraft blueprints. 

The Initial sculptural configuration is a form suggestive of a cocoon, an airplane cockpit, an aircraft engine. 

The  27'x16' flat painting (on 288 aluminium panels) are hung three-dimensionally  over, through, and around a metal infrastructure. (In this iteration, the sculpture is of 12' h  x  5'  widest diameter.)

The 2D elements are the work functioning as a flat ‘painting’;  a butterfly wing (the beginning image of the work);  the aircraft blueprints; the initial 12' x 6' line-drawing (in metal) of a jet fighter/butterfly wing that becomes the sculpture's infrastructure; the words found on the blueprint schematics; the thin aluminium panels on which the work is painted; the shadows thrown by the sculpture. 

The 3D elements are the cocoon/fuselage/engine sculptural arrangement (and future sculpture/installation reconfigurations); the X-Y-Z axis arrangement (for structural support of the painting) of the component parts of the metal line-drawing.

The 4D elements are the painting/sculpture as it's rearranged/deconstructed over time. Panels and sections can be regrouped, shifted, spun, etc; the work can be hung on the wall flat or bas-relief; it can be free-standing, hanging, flowing around corners; condensed, expanded, atomized (no pieces physically connected), intermixed with other works, etc. Additionally, all the painted surfaces -- the iridescent blues, opalescent whites, and substrate silvers-- change appearance according to the movement of the viewer, and the work looks significantly different  according to the light (direct, spotlit, ambient, barely lit) over time. And the cocoon>butterfly reference relates to transformation... as does the ascension from 2 to 3 to 4D upwards...

CRISPR SCULPTR - This work consists of large paintings distributed (into a sculpture (that is a recombinant installation (that is a function))). A palimpsest sculpture: it’s original form overwritten over time, it’s content changing while still using the same substrate. [READ MORE HERE]

Infinite possiblity. Transformation, evolution, change, ephemerality, beautiful instability, the passage of time, impermanence, shifting perspectives, growth, spontaneity, chance, adaptability, modest/monumental.

In the same way that the 3 billion pieces of information that make up the human body do not explain the individual person or their personality, the gestalt potentials of the installation are bigger than just the volume of its discrete units.

Below are some of the transformations of the work, some of the ways the work can explore many ideas, from migration to viruses, from the antrhopocene to articfial intelligence, from decentralization to weather. Rising as a sea to cover other artworks, migrating as a mass through an institution over weeks, infecting a musueum, distributed throughout an entire building…

Each iteration is to exist as its own unique work, however the work can also be viewed within the context of its past and future versions.

Some iterations of CRISPR SCULPTR follow. It is an expansive landscape echoing the surroundings, or resonant to the weather pattern in that locale, or as a virus infecting the space, units added over time, or as migrating mass moving through the territories of the musuem, or as sea-level (or detritus) rising to cover other objects, or decentralized and distributed in parts around the institution…. the contnent overwritten simultatneously carried and accreting…:

Wall Installations:

K.I.A. Sculptures made from paintings. 2D, 3D, 4D works. Separately created paintings recombined three-dimensionally, in various ways over time, to create new forms and content. An infinitely unfinished work. Megacollage metapainting mashups.

Each individual work is a uniquely conceived idea (i.e. a Masai shield composed of mathematical formulae.) Each work has an originating image, and is done on panels that are recombinant — individual rows, columns, sections and so on can be moved, shifted, flipped, rotated (etc) to deconstruct the painting… and the more panels there are, the more the possible recombinations.

When the paintings are intermixed, all sorts of completely unforeseen  arrangements can arise both from the increase in number of panels, but also the collision of different subject matter enables are sorts of new connotations and meanings to accrete. The painting becomes an installation, a megacollage that grows in size, content, meaning and implication. Mathematical noation bumps up agains musical notation. Writings on nature are enmeshed with writings about proper behaviour. Curvilinear rock drawings become an oversized tessera in a mask mosaic…

The Landscape as palimpsest:

Below are land art works, using weather, done every winter season at the same location. The materials are found weather (wind, snow, rain, ice), ash, water, effort, powder, on ice. Within hours (occasionally a day) of the work being “completed” , it is overwritten by the weather. The land, or location, becomes a palimpsest over the years, the artwork erased and another and different work created on the same canvas (a frozen, snowy lake) the next year. Land art as palimpsest, new information and images added and erased over time, across decades.

Other art by K.I.A.:

© all art by K.I.A.