STATEMENT / BIO
KS is a transdisciplinary artist-researcher and Ph.D. candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, exploring how life is normatively preserved and extended in ecological and medical contexts, and alternatives made possible from queer standpoints of death and decay. 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. They work directly with biological agents (flies, mold, fungi, bacteria, etc.) to bring forward their roles in our lives and afterlives, and break down our typical relationship of abjection. Resulting pieces incorporate multiple senses (sight, sound, touch) in multiple mediums (video, audio, sculpture, installation) in search of temporal and embodied encounters between human and/or inhuman beings that might shift our relationships to death and decay beyond normative framings. 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. Recently they’ve shared work at EMPAC (Troy, NY), Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), SATELIT Design Gallery (Bratislava, Slovakia), 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 Catalyst Journal (forthcoming).
