"Found" dance performances, from "The Window" series by K.I.A.

It’s all a dance — we just don’t always hear the music. Here’s some “found” solo and group performances from The Window caught over the last two years (preview of the Substack page, see the full post & subscribe HERE

“Honor your partner / Oh promenade / Get all stirred up / Like lemonade…” - Box the Gnat

“We pull and we push push/ Gimme some of that crush crush / Don’t do it, don’t blush blush / Badness is good stuff” - Make Me Shake (Gimme Some Crush Crush)

“Massive ballerina, on the dark stage / Pirouettes for millennia, starred arms out / Awaiting a hero / Only to embrace endless night, and absolute zero.” - Massive Ballerina

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The Window by K.I.A.: Every Photo a Film

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New section, or themed grouping, in the ginormous 24/7/365/1 photo project The Window by K.I.A.: Section 10 - Vignettes. These images hit at a bigger story happening beyond the borders of the photo — a shooting, a protest, a wedding, a riot, Drake, and Taylor Swift (ies)... (Many — most — of the images in the project are portraits showing the diversity, velocity, hilarity, vanity, complexity, eccentricity (etc) of the modern city in the 21st century. SEE VIGNETTES HERE. (Individual and compilation images available as signed editioned prints.)

morse-code forest, general stealth and argent armor

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“e dot tree dot” by K.I.A. , is 84” x 60”
-black/gold/silver oilstick on scratched and scored aluminum.

Whenever I see a birch forest, the patterns of white and black feel like an encoded message being sent by the earth. So I took a poem by e.e. cummings “when by now and tree by leaf”, translated it into the dots and dashes of Morse code, and overlayed and image of a birch forest with it. I then translated key nouns from the poem (i.e. “snow”) into secretarial shorthand symbols for the cursive part of the painting.

The lines that make up the drawing are more than just decorative or structural -- they are themselves information. (The broader implication: behind everything we see there is a higher, or at least different, order of reality.) They are palimpsests — information layered on information.

General Stealth Car River 84 x 60”, oilstick on aluminum by K.I.A.

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

Argent Silk Armor 84 x 60 x 5"” oilstick on faceted aluminum

A palimpsest— layers of textile shapes 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.

CRISPR MICRO

New small work in the CRISPR series. Variegated, textured, reflective, linear and faceted surface that optically shifts according to position, light changes, distance, etc. (Inquire for details). See also the larger works (and public art scale works) in this series.

abstract paintings by K.I.A., silver abstract wall sculpture by toronto artist Kirby Ian Andersen

CRISPR painting series by K.I.A.

CRISPR SILVR - genetically modified paintings

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New work in the CRISPR series of genetically modified (spliced) paintings, “CRISPR SILVR” 50 x 40 x 2”, acrylic on paper on panel. The sculptural painting consists of thousands of discrete slices of paper spliced togethe, with the work shifting and optically changing with the light and angle. See the ongoing series HERE

(The work below is the yang to its yin, same dimensions)

The Window by K.I.A.: compilation images

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Compilation of photographs as grouped by theme into a single image.

The compilations range from two up to 60+ images. Dimensions variable and flexible — portrait, landscape, square, etc. Inquiries welcome.

Here are a few examples of the “visual poems” compilted from The Window, a 24/7/365/1 project documenting the diversity, velocity, and humanity of life at this moment.

See more of the compilations HERE (and more being added over time.)

“ultimulticulti” (39 image compilation):

“Views From the Six” (36 image compilation):

“Happiness Is Motion” (aka “Wheelers and Wheelies” (6 image compilation):

Other compilations: Gravity/Antigravity, Wraiths Below the Window, Sequences….

General Stealth Car River

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General Stealth Car River 84 x 60”, oilstick on aluminum by K.I.A.

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

ACQUIRED!: CRISPR ROUTR

This 40 x 30” work is off to a collection.

It’s from the ‘genetically modified’ CRISPR painting series where the visual genes — strips sliced from separately made paintings or painted post-cutting — are recombined (interleaved or spliced) to create a new painting. This particular piece has thousands and thousands of individual strips, and was created during an art residency at the Banff Centre. For this particular work, individual slices and whole sections were dipped in ink and then interleaved. Later the work was sanded to give it a sun-bleached or aged look.

The work reveals subtle details with close or repeated viewing — tectonic fissures, rough edging, horizontal striations. (Kinda like viewing a linear mandala or a zen garden, or wave sets on the ocean, or a waterfall that appears constant but changes when close up…

STUDIO VIEW ADIEU

In-studio works: CRISPR Blu, a painting/sculpture composed of 1000s of individually shaped discete visual units (blue from the front, but reveals as orange/pink/purple from an oblique angle); next, an assemblage of some of the smaller works in the CRISPR series assembled on the wall.

The CRISPR series are “genetically modified” paintings, where discrete visual units — slices from paintings, are spliced together into a new form. They are sculptural, and reveal differently from different angles.

(Inquire for specfic details on works)

The Window (Threefer)

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A study of the diversity and velocity of the modern metropolis…

Images from the ongoing photo series “The Window” by K.I.A. (See pages 1-6 on the sight, email for password, prints, nfts, and exhibition inquiries).

“Crosswalk Catwalk”:

“Movement Not Moving”:

Read about the below image “The Wandering Bishop” HERE.

The Map Is Not That

The Map Is Not That (The Map Is Not the Territory) 84 x 60”, oilstick on folded aluminum.

Navigational and star charts, satellite shots, gps, glyphs, geography, molecular maps. Micro to Macro. 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.

Other works on aluminun, 84 x 60”, (more about HERE):

And also these recombinant and intermixable aluminum panel works (more about HERE); below are a few of the infinite arrangements of the works, see the link for the “seed” (original) paintings:

Aurora, Comet, Cloud Chamber...

A sculpture, a volumetric line drawing, an installation, variable in scale. Permanent or ephemeral. The below sculpture “Aurora” is 144 x 60 x 48” and is adaptable in shape and size to various settings. Future works in this series are to be absolutely enormous (and colorful). The inspiration for this was auroras, comets, van allen belts, electricity, subatomic cloud chambers…

The work builds on the other sculptures seen below, all of which are single works created from mutliple component parts, the purpose of which is so they can be transformed in scale and shape, and meaning, (and ship easily.) Much of my work (paintings, sculpture, installation, and photo projects) is constructed this way - in no smal part to highlight the beautiful precarity of life (change always) and how larger systems are composed of unique discrete parts (the forest is the trees / the forest is not the trees, the individual is not the collective, etc).

Left: two separate paintings, each made of dozens recombinant panels, intermixed; Center: conduit tree, made from hundreds of component parts, Right: NDF, a work made from hundreds fo feathers, darts and needles. All are variable in scale and shape. The below works is a enormous and complex volumetric painting/sculpture, in development (and awaiting an ambitious curator).

Many more works like this on the site; poke around…

Genetically Modified Found Wind (Acquired)

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This work is from the ongoing CRISPR series. They are GMAs (gen mod art), with their visual DNA — taken from multiple paintings — sliced and spliced together to create new works. They are also digital/analog hybrids, in that each of the 1000s of spliced elements are discrete, like a pixel, but they are analog (exist IRL, cut from paper). The component pieces are meticulously placed together to create a cohesive abstract with a complex and optically-shifting surface with a type of retinal rhyme scheme.

This particular work is actually made from found wind from various geographical locations; that is, the wind (mountains, a lake, a prairie, etc) was used to drift the paint on various flat substrates, which were then chopped up and intermixed.

(Acquired recently by Canadian art collector).

A recent work in the series CRISPR BLU (50 x 40 x 3”) , acrylic on archival paper. Thousands of hand-cut units of paper, each entirely unique. This particular work presents hyper-blue from the front (with silver edging), but at oblique angles multiple colors are subtly revealed (magentas, purples, oranges, reds).