Inspired by the work of Tina M. Kampt and Christina Sharpe, Kimberly’s practice explores one ontological contemplation - How can we make seeable the frequencies of Blackness while maintaining an opacity that is essential to its continued survival?
Referencing a private collection of photographs and ephemera gifted to her in 2020, Kimberly transcribes the quotidian lives of her loved ones onto canvas. She wields a monochromatic palette of drawing and painting materials to render iridescent semblances of their photographic referents, imbuing their painted form with spatial elements that were flatted in their photographic form.
Her material exploration looks deeply into opacities, textures, and specular reflections and serves as an analog to more interior contemplations. As each material absorbs and reflects varying frequencies of light, themes of objectness, refusal, and temporality begin to emerge. The extracted image is thus destabilized and transmuted into a precarious, unfixed form. To ‘see’ the work, viewers are charged to continuously reorient their bodies in relationship to the painted object, renegotiating the conventional choreography that comprises much of the viewing experience in painting.
Understanding the canonical history of images and their power to communicate and perpetuate complex ideas of identity and authority, Kimberly’s triadic exploration of traditional drawing, painting, and photographic processes seeks to reveal the collective impact of empirical destabilization on generations of the African Diaspora.
Kimberly R. Heard is a research-based visual artist. Her upbringing was deeply informed by frequent relocation experiences in San Diego, CA, and various locations within Alabama. She enjoys home-cooked meals, collecting ergodic zines, and caring for her houseplants. Kimberly is currently pursuing her MFA in Painting at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, CT, with an expectancy of completion in 2026.
Email:
khrdstudio@gmail.com