Visual Depth: The Art Portfolio of Kyla Slobodin
Concrete, fujifilm fp 3000 instant black and white film, taken with a Polaroid camera
Kyla Slobodin works in a variety of traditional media, combining and layering representational images to create images that deepen as the viewer looks on. In photographic works, the artist takes a different approach to creating visual depth, capturing eerie and isolated spaces.
the three chairs, black and white 35mm film
In our previous feature, we looked at Kyla’s antique style photographs, and the way that the artist uses dolls to enact bizarre, dramatic, sometimes unnerving tableaux. The majority of Kyla’s photographic practice centers on black and white photographs, and I enjoy the way that her drawings and tracing parallel this desaturated aesthetic.
In the artist’s ink/tracing/mark making gallery, the images are detailed and yet almost abstract. Many of these art pieces contain human figures, but these figures tend to be obscured behind other imagery – flowers, the occasional piece of text or fragment of a map – so that the viewer may not immediately notice them. The imagery in these pieces forms a complex web of meaning, a maze of possible answers that the viewer can choose to derive.
