STATEMENT / BIO
KS Brewer is a transdisciplinary artist-researcher and Ph.D. student of Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, exploring the normative imperative to preserve and extend life in medical and ecological contexts, and alternatives made possible from queer and abject standpoints of death and decay. CPR manikins, flesh flies, and corpses animate their theoretical and creative concerns. Their process of research-creation critically combines theories of biology, medicine, and thanatology with hands-on biological and ethnographic research, leading to experiential art outcomes. Resulting pieces incorporate multiple senses (sight, sound, touch) in multiple mediums (video, audio, sculpture, installation) in search of affective encounters between human and/or inhuman beings that might shift our relationships to death and decay beyond their normative framings. This focus had led them to work with biological creatures and materials including mold and fungi, blow flies, and their own blood, while creating interactive art pieces from these relationships. Results may resemble historic technologies, moldering reliquaries, living organisms, toxic fumes, ASMR soundtracks, traumatic flashbacks, surveillance footage, ghosts, monsters, pests, or some combination thereof.
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KS holds a BA in filmmaking from NYU, and uses their training in time-based technologies and experience as a professional fabricator to inform their practice. Recent shows include Co-Prosperity Gallery of the Public Media Institute (Chicago, IL), the IOTA Institute at the University of Windsor (Windsor, Canada), the Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (Cholula, Mexico), and Amatryx Gaming Lab & Studio (Buffalo, NY). Their work has been published in Forbes, Ravelin, and Hyperallergic, and their writing is published in Strange Matters Magazine and World Futures Review (forthcoming).
