Kim Marra Wrestles Chaos and Control in Her Intimate, Dreamlike Paintings
“The world’s chaos has a way of making us feel small and helpless; sometimes the only thing left to do is take it in and make art,” Kim Marra tells Helms Bakery District.
In an attempt to wrestle the chaos and control her environment, LA-based painter and curator Kim Marra created in my room, a topsy-turvy series of collage-style paintings created during the pandemic. However, Kim notes, “[The series] is in no way a conscious response to the pandemic.” With endless time to imagine a redecorated home, Kim dreamt up a fractured world where synthetic objects stand in for natural wonders. “The paintings featured in this series consider the relationship between manmade objects and their surrounding natural environments, often substituting one for the other,” she writes in her artist statement. “In one instance, using fabric as a stand-in for water; in another, for a rolling hill-side.”
Kim embraces a David Hockney-esque flatness that’s disrupted by textural folds, wood grain, and shaded concrete, all puzzled together to explore the relationship between manmade and natural structures. “The work is a meditation on how people interact with the world around us,” she says. “How we manipulate space for our comforts, abuse our natural resources for personal gain, and rely on our houses and communities stability, without necessarily considering how they came to be.”
Kim’s work lingers in the sweet spot between abstraction and representation as she “deconstructs visual references to places and objects, to then reassemble them and create new dreamlike and surreal environments.” The resulting spaces are “deeply personal” to Kim, but at the same time, “entirely unreal.”
“The world’s chaos has a way of making us feel small and helpless; sometimes the only thing left to do is take it in and make art.” — Kim Marra
Kim Marra: Website | Instagram | Purchase Work
All photos published with permission of the artist(s); photos: Ian Byers-Gamber.
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