Kiara Gilbert is the featured artist for the “On Separation” Community Anthology. Below is their artist statement, which provides context for the artwork they submitted for the anthology, which you can find on the top of each published piece.
So many of my earliest memories were stories. Often not mine in origin, but gifted to me by my first loved ones, who remembered their elders through the repetition of narratives, and hoped I would too. It took years to understand the gift of a story everyone has heard a hundred times or more. The texture of it becomes the knowing glances and rhythm of laughter that peppers the experience. The gift of shared narrative is one that I embrace in both my family of origin and chosen family as the thing that tethers us to each other and our overlapping pasts. My practice is rooted in the veneration of narratives as the truest markers of ancestry and lineage.
My work leans into a Southern Gothicism that is fueled by lives of black queer and trans people throughout time. So many of the stories from my community are buried underneath years of punitive laws and media coverage that sought to banish the LGBTQIA+ community from society. Luckily, despite tremendous danger, there were still queer people who not only lived in their truth, but also documented it so that generations later, people persecuted in similar ways could find proof of their lineage of queer resilience and non-conformity. My research into predominantly Southern American, queer communities of color is the basis for the fantastical narratives I create with my prints and installations. Inspired by Saidiyah Hartman’s methodology of reading humanity into written materials from history that often dehumanize the subject, I combine my lived experience and references to queer coded media to craft images that breathe life into the cycles we tread that have built spiritual connections to the people who have walked this path before, with, and ahead of us.
Click on the images above to see them larger.
I utilize print media, drawing, painting, and mixed-media found-object installation to create glimpses into the past that function as mirrors for the present. Print media’s ability to be replicated infinitely and imperfectly functions as both the physical incarnation of retelling a story, as well as a tangible way of ensuring that these portals into history remain accessible to those that inhabit the spirit of the text.
In reading over the drafts that would later become this iteration of the anthology, I saw a familiar need to archive and understand and caress and disrupt narratives made salient by the passage of time. I employed mixed media collages that combined traditionally printed and drawn elements with digital collage and painting techniques to pay homage to the stories and their tellers.
To see the rest of the featured artwork, browse through the published pieces here.
