Conditions matter.
I work from the belief that nothing we move through is neutral. The ways we see, live, learn, and relate are shaped by structures that often go unnamed but are deeply felt.
My work begins there, inside environments that press, limit, misalign, or quietly govern what a body can be.
Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, I examine how perception operates through color, surface, and material, attending to thresholds where visual recognition gives way to spectral sensing and bodily feeling. The work resists the assumption that seeing produces understanding.
Eschewing personal narrative, the work attends to the conditions and structures that make presence possible, strained, or unresolved. I use fragmentation, coded imagery, and color mixing as strategies to slow perception. These are not symbolic in the traditional sense, but ways of preserving the complexity in spaces that tend to flatten it, allowing contradictions to remain unresolved.
I work fluidly between abstraction and figuration. Figures appear intermittently, sometimes clearly, sometimes as residue. Limbs and faces surface briefly, not to invite identification, but to register pressure before dissolving back into the painted field. Similarly, color and form do not offer cohesion so much as gestural disruptors. Scenes of quotidian life are sourced from personal ephemera and reworked through accumulations of thinly layered drawing and painting. Through opacity, density, and specular reflection, architectural settings work to situate the figures in a space that is also incomplete in its construction.
The work does not ask to be decoded, but rather to be stayed with, even in its turbulence. If the images feel unsettled, it is because they are shaped by conditions that are themselves unstable. My interest is in what persists inside those conditions, and in how tuning one’s attention might gather an affective weight that can be sensed within.
Kimberly is currently working in New Haven, CT to complete her MFA in Painting at Yale School of Art. She is a 2025 - 2026 AICAD Nominee and the 2025 recipient of the Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Travel Fellowship. Her work has exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego, NAAMCC, Bread & Salt Gallery, and the Getty Foundation PST Art. She enjoys quietude, home-cooked meals, zinemaking, and the sound that leaves make when they encounter rain.
Email:
khrdstudio@gmail.com
