About the Artist

In Kira's work, animals serve as a once-removed context for fundamentally human ideas about existence. By using a kind of personification, Kira can cut directly to emotion or ideas without the interference of the human presence, thus omitting any assumptions one might make through a social lens. The animals aren’t symbols so much as actors and characters. They do not carry meaning but make it up through their poses, actions and interactions with other creatures. Sometimes they even become tangled or paradoxical. Often the organisms in Kira's work pull at each other in some way or unravel and weave together. In this way there is a question about existence and the distances between the end of one organism and the beginning of another. These connections and transformations are what Kira wants to explore in order to seek out answers about their own existence. While working, they find themselves most frequently turning to instances of people trying to make sense of the natural world. Medieval bestiaries, natural histories, and scientific illustration are all traditions Kira draws from as well as accounts, personal and otherwise, of the queer experience. Kira layers images to form a base for their work as a way to compile any information they have gathered and as a means to reflect the way any organism exists within itself and the world. In 2020, they completed their BFA in Studio Art at University of Texas at Austin before returning to their home town: Houston, Texas. Kira can be contacted via Instagram or email, both of which are linked at the bottom of this page.