contact |
bioKit Bernal (b. 1997, California) is an artist and curator who interprets relationships between images, objects, and spaces. With a special interest in photography, interiors, and institutions, she uses an intersectional and decolonial lens to examine the ways we create meaning from looking. Currently based in Denver, Kit is completing her Masters of Arts Coursework in Art History with a concentration in Museum Studies at the University of Denver. In 2019, she received her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, WA. She is the second-year Madden Fellow at the University of Denver, was the youngest attendee at Otis College of Art and Design’s Emerging Curators Retreat in 2018, curated thirteen group and solo shows at Cornish College of the Arts’ Closet Gallery, and drinks too much coffee.
artist statementSeeing precedes looking precedes knowing—not in the definitive sense but in the transient, emotional sense. The constant saturation of images around us—both physical and digital—have made the average person more visually literate than ever before. Exploring how images create meaning in relation with each other and the space in which they exist is the cornerstone of my practice.
This can take many forms (sketchbook spreads, moodboards, Google Slides, social media) but it primarily manifests in transfers of images between collage, installation, and photography. Reproductions of art, old family photos, Polaroids, found slides and imagery and ripped out magazine pages interact with each other and within broader physical environments, flattened back into image by a camera. Parallel to this practice is curating, which also focuses on the relationship, arrangement, and contextualization of images and objects within a physical space. Curating is fundamentally optimistic; it asks not only what there is but what there might be, and it believes in the transformative and human power of the museum and gallery enough to address its inherent and continuing institutional colonialism. These inquiries into equity and goals of finding meaning continue to draw me into the curatorial field. |