Caley Kirchner is a Visual Artist

Caley Kirchner is a sculptor and installation artist based in New York. Her work moves through domestic space, labor, and the quiet ways technology reshapes everyday life, building environments that are at once familiar and unsettling. She identifies as a maker first, drawn equally to the conceptual and the physical act of construction. Her work focuses on three-dimensional forms, combining traditional techniques like mold-making with contemporary materials and processes. Outside the studio, Caley enjoys collecting comics and being around animals.

Artists Statement

My work centers around the curiosity about how society is divided through things like class structure and the large political divide. I want to understand why American politics, specifically under late-stage capitalism, is surprised by its self-implosion that has always been promised. The effects of how corporations run America are very evident in the way the government is run as well as the effects on its citizens. The system that we worship is not made for the hard-working people of America, but the people in charge of it.

The government wants its citizens to be conditioned and give in to all their tactics to control the population however they need. This is being done very well under our noses and it’s important to bring it to light. I explore this with themes regarding the working class domestic space and through emotions that are experienced from events that are taking place. Something that still feels radical, is that the domestic space is never just a domestic space, it’s a political space that has been successfully disguised as a private one. 

Digital tools like video and projection in my practice put this feeling into a visual experience, because the sensation it gives us is familiar to the feeling that we associate with being on our devices all the time. We’ve been desensitized and distracted from the events occurring in the real world through social media addiction. What becomes clear in my work, is that my material practice and my conceptual concerns have been circling the same problem of what gets hidden, and how, and by whom. My work encourages people to see that every one of us is just a number to the companies that heavily influence the government’s choices.  

The work produces newfound specific discomfort, not despair, but recognition, to situate the viewer in that emotion. Something that comes from seeing something you already knew but hadn't let yourself feel yet. When viewing one of my pieces, that recognition becomes harder to ignore once you've discovered it. Awareness is where change starts and making space for it, even briefly, is all that matters.