Kirby Ian

Kirby Ian Andersen (AKA K.I.A.) is a painter and sculptor who has exhibited in Canada, the US & Japan, showing paintings, collages, cyanotypes and sculptures in telephone booths and galleries, on frozen lakes and in museums, including presenting a massive and infinitely recombinant installation recently at a Banff Centre residency. The work is in private and corporate collections in Japan, the US, Canada, the UK & Europe, including commissions for lobbies, atriums and yachts, and has been covered in the Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, LA Weekly, Japan Times, Forbes & other media. "I'd gather disparate material from various countries — posters, manga, etc — and create poem collages by slicing them into strips in a visual rhyme scheme (A/B/A/B).” In Canada, K.I.A. once incorporated found flora, turning the paintings into a form of architected nature.

K.I.A.’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture and installation. This wide range of artwork conflates city, nature, and digital environments. K.I.A.’s paintings, through their structured and organic forms enlivened by intuitive blooms of colour, attempt to poetically convey life in the 21st century with its beautiful accelerations, blended realities, and boundless possibilities. Imagery from various locations, times, and environments are compressed together in linear sections, creating an open-ended sense of time and place. K.I.A. has multiple ongoing series; some examples from each are included in the portfolio, more of which can be shown upon request. All work at large scale.