Kira Maria Shewfelt

Kira Maria Shewfelt grew up in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s and has spent all her adult life “in and out of the city”.

My family background is Colombian American; half of my family is originally from the Midwest and the other half is from Colombia. I left LA for a long time, but I think a lot about this place when I’m away.

You say that when you’re away, LA iconography comes back to you. What kind of iconography, some examples?
I did my MFA in New York where most of the school year is in the dead of winter. I was painting these beach scenes with palm trees and really warm colors. It was kind of tropical, which LA is not exactly, but hot. I grew up around surfers, and I never painted a surfer before I left LA. I think that Los Angeles and the West has a physicality to it that you don’t realize until you leave, that’s not just the place but also the way your body moves in that place. The paintings were really about seeking happiness.

Not only do you have three degrees from schools like Yale, NYU and USC, but you have also been a teacher at both Pepperdine and NYU. What insights have you learnt from teaching?
I gravitated towards image making in general because it’s a very open story, as opposed to language. There are so many reads possible. Similarly in terms of judgement or criteria, it evades it all together. It exists outside of metrics that most people can apply to something that’s good or bad, except you can always tell if it’s made with care and I love that value system. A really important thing for me in teaching has been emphasizing that to students.

You have recently become a mother! Has that inspired any new artistic practices or ideas which you didn’t have prior to having children?
I’ve been really interested in relationship dynamics for a long time. A lot of the work in this show is athletic, like the dynamic of a surfer on a wave, or two players on a court. Landscapes are emotional, and I think about the body as a container for feeling, and the world as a container for feeling too. Now I have this new relationship with my baby, which is something I’ve never experienced before. Instead of just players or lovers, or whatever it was that I was more familiar with, I now have a bunch of drawings of my baby and me nursing her and that closeness and touchpoint is something I’m learning about as I’m making them.

Duality is a present theme in all your paintings. Can you elaborate on the idea of duality?
I think that there’s a lot of coexistence or inclusivity that I’m reaching for in terms of choosing or developing images. That’s inclusive of mixed feelings as well. I’ve had work that feels curious and dangerous, or romantic but also suffocating. These things can coexist. Even the way that I render faces and figures often have many embedded colors. On a different level, a lot of the fire paintings right now are trying to hold space for some sort of remedy within something that’s alarming, like all the forest fires in California. I spent a lot of time in the Sierras and in Yosemite, my grandparents have a cabin there, so I’ve been there my entire life and, now I’m watching it burn. I’m trying to reconcile this feeling and trying to find some way into the conflict of it too. A painting isn’t going to remedy anything directly but having these beautiful memories in a place that is now burning down is so strange and true.

With Fin, not only is the actual composition of the painting dynamic, but there’s also a stark split between cool and warm colors.
I always knew I wanted this painting to be hot. I have a test for this painting which is somehow more candy colored in a way. This painting just became hotter, rather than fluorescent or candy colored. As I was making it, I tipped into this place of destruction, these colors felt more destructive to me. At some point I think I looked for that to balance with cool.

Photos by Daniel Sahlberg.