Karina Kalvaitis
Artist’s Statement - 2005

What I have come to love about being an artist is the process of creating a visual language for a nebulous set of ideas. A complex mix of thoughts, feelings and references can be made manifest in a single object or drawing. The skills I have learned as an artist have enabled me to express the world within my own head.

Human beings trying to co-exist on this planet are like animals of different species trying to communicate - errors in understanding are common. My artwork often represents the vulnerability that is an inherent part of being alive. By illustrating situations that speak of isolation, I depict the impossibility of getting along by oneself and point to our strong desire for unity, despite the inherent difficulties in communication. Whether by creating tiny vulnerable creatures or the empty spaces where something or someone might have lived, the common thread in my work is the depiction of a longing for union with others.

To create artwork which illustrates this vulnerability I often return to certain visual elements. Most notably: the circus and the nursery. Nurseries speak of fragility and a sometimes overwhelming neediness. Circus paraphernalia is a hint that fantastical things which are usually hidden will be exposed (to step inside a circus tent is to become a voyeur). To me, both the circus and nursery are highly charged sites - as well as having the potential for real beauty. By referencing toys and circus motifs, I am also inviting viewers to consider these artworks as devices of the imagination. Like toys, these constructions invite narrative.

Strange and mysterious animals sometimes populate the charged environments of my artwork. They are often delicate, limbless, and sometimes are only a hollow skin. The circumstances of these animals’ existence seem fraught with a sense of vulnerability, as their surroundings have elements of both homes and cages. I see them as humans reduced to their animal states, stripped of artifice and culture. Animals as subject matter have long compelled me, particularly when they are placed in situations which reference human experience. When they are isolated and defenseless they speak to our elemental fear of being left alone and unprotected, at the mercy of the elements and other beings whose motives we cannot comprehend.

These artworks capture the pregnant pause – a stillness before some small and strange emotional drama is played out. Taken together they create a world that is familiar, yet more intricate and intense than our own. The players in these dramas and the realms in which they live are like another biological sphere parallel to this one. Like the fabled monster in the lake, they are of this world, yet tantalizingly out of reach.