Kimberly R. Heard works as a research-based visual artist exploring the systemic and cultural wake in which the legacy of Black humanity continues to exist. Inspired by Tina M. Campt, Christina Sharpe, and Calvin L. Warren, Kimberly’s work encompasses two ontological contemplations. How can we utilize images and their processes to access quiescent methodologies? How can we make seeable frequencies of Blackness while maintaining an opacity that is essential to its continued survival?


Kimberly’s work hybridizes painting and drawing, using black pigments and graphite to explore opacity, texture, and specular reflection as an analog to the aforementioned contemplations. In doing so, themes of objectness, refusal, and ephemerality frequent her process and work. Understanding the canonical history of images and their ability to communicate, and subsequently perpetuate, complex ideas of power and identity, Kimberly aims to interrogate processes of drawing, painting, and photography surfacing their collective impact on generations of the African Diasporic population.


Using projections of photographic images from a private collection gifted to her in 2020, Kimberly reconstructs images of the quotidian lives of her loved ones onto canvas. Wielding a monochromatic palette, her interplay of charcoals, conte, oil paint, and graphite render iridescent semblances of their photographic sources, adding a layer of dimensionality that responds to changes in viewpoint. Each material emits a dynamic range of electromagnetic frequencies that simultaneously reveal and conceal components of the reconstructed image. By mediating archival material and ontological theory, the information within the original photograph is destabilized - transmuted into an unfixed form that evinces auxiliaries of Blackness across time.

Email:
khrdstudio@gmail.com