My work investigates how pleasure, fetishization, and consumption become intertwined with myth, shame, and deception. I take an interdisciplinary approach, working in sculpture, video, performance, audio, and painting. Frequently employing my own body, both physically and through representation, the work complicates ideas of consent, perversion, and beauty. Often proposing the question: am I doing it to myself, or is it being done to me? The sculptures tend to be large-scale and anthropomorphic or zoomorphic, making it unclear which form inhabits the other. Submissive postures and fixed limbs give the figures little agency, and appear as though they’re awaiting engagement. I work with an array of materials that support the playful and unsettling aspects of my work. Paper clay, silicone, foam, found objects, and airbrushed acrylic paint are used to create harsh colors, uncanny skin textures, and simulated deterioration.
My upbringing in Northern Florida has become the central theme of my practice. When visiting, encounters with family, advertisements, gift shops, and roadside attractions become reference, supported by my personal archive of photo and video. Florida is full of never-ending contradictions; conservative and feral, magical and disillusioning. Heightening the already present debauchery within Florida’s subcultures, I accentuate the perversion that often stands in broad daylight, but is disguised by tourism, play, and fantastical realities. I create visceral experiences by fabricating a fictionalized realism that demands attention. The act of viewing coaxes the onlooker into an internal monologue, challenging their own engagement with the work–guilt through proximity. Pleasure and disgust become entangled, and beauty becomes interrupted by the residue of violence and a voyeuristic presence.
Kaia Love King-Hall (b. 2002) is an artist and curator from Jacksonville, Florida. She is currently working towards her Bachelors in Art at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in Los Angeles, California.
Photo by Elodie Hekimian-Brogan