How can we engage a futurist imagination of Black be(ing) when the normative models of perception are rooted in its opposition? Can we make seeable the frequency of Blackness while maintaining an opacity that is essential to its continued survival?
Kimberly Heard (b. 1991) is an antidisciplinary artist investigating the instability and mutability of perception. Hybridizing painting, sculpture, and installation, Kimberly explores opacity, texture, and specular reflection as an analog to the aforementioned contemplations.
Referencing both embodied memories and photographic images from a private collection gifted to her in 2020, her As Symbol & Concept series began with an interest in reconstructing archival images of quotidian life onto canvas. Merging an assortment of drawing materials (i.e., charcoal, conte, oil pastel, and chalks) with oil-based mediums, domestic scenes gradually assert themselves to the eye, negotiating what is revealed and concealed to viewer’s as their physical proximity to the works change.
However, where As Symbol & Concept amplifies spatial qualities surrounding the canvas, new untitled works amplify the tensions within, expounding upon her interest in the quotidian and mundane, albeit derived from a more diaristic origin. Here, vibrant color fields of umbers, siennas, crimsons, veridian greens, and chromatic blacks are applied to canvas in thin layers of wet-on-wet oil paint. Figures are often emergent, entangled, or immersed in domestic architectures and gestural surroundings. As the eye traverses illusionistic space, her precise rendering of the body - hands, scapulas, calves, and facial expressions - map tender moments of rest that ground the viewing experience.
Across disciplines, a steady throughline in her practice remains: a fervent examination into the precariousness of representation. Utmost, Heard seeks to evince the porous threshold between what is sensed, seen, and perceived. Drawing a conceptual framework from contemporary theorists Tina Kampt, Christina Sharpe, and others, she continues her As Symbol & Concept series, deploying abstraction and symbology as vehicles of fugitivity, remaining acutely aware of the inexorable field of signification. From plaster moldings to acrylic engravings, roofing felt weavings to collograph prints, these fragmented gestures and materials accrue with a potent tactility that seeks to steal/trap the vestibular transition of concept to indexical form.
Kimberly’s recent exhibitions include Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Gallery QI, and Bread & Salt Gallery. She is the 2025 recipient of the Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Travel Fellowship and currently working in New Haven, CT to complete her MFA in Painting at the Yale School of Art. She enjoys quietude, home-cooked meals, bookmaking, and the sound that leaves make when they encounter rain.
Email:
khrdstudio@gmail.com
