KATHLEEN GRANADOS
(b. 1986, Long Island; living and working in Inwood)
Multimedia experimental artist Kathleen Granados incorporates found materials from New York and her family’s living spaces to create spatial imaginaries, exploring the home, domesticity, and the outdoors. Layering textures over familiar objects, Granados evokes memory while obscuring the items themselves, creating residues of a household.
Granados received a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology (2009) and an MFA from CUNY Hunter College (2020). She presently works as adjunct faculty in fine arts at the Fashion Institute of Technology and a visiting artist in fine arts at the School of Visual Arts. Recent exhibitions include The Subject of Extra Scrutiny (205 Hudson Gallery, New York, 2022), Almost Home: Jesus Benavente and Kathleen Granados (ebb curatorial, Brooklyn, 2021), Common Threads (Dyckman Farmhouse, New York, 2016), and I found god in myself—a dedication to the works of Ntozake Shange (traveling, 2014–2018).
WORK IN THE EXHIBITION
Distant as the Milky Way, 2023 (detail)
Acrylic yarn, thread, found radio, audio recording, wood, mirror, acrylic paint, and felt
78 52 15 in.
Kathleen Granados’s multimedia collages, featuring familiar household objects draped in fabric, evoke residual memories of domestic spaces, childhood, and the outdoors. Distant as the Milky Way expands this exploration of memory and distance into a soundscape. Borne out of Granados’s efforts to restore her late father’s cassette tapes from the early 1970s, this project offers a sampling of the oldies her father listened to throughout his life, combining them with audio clips of her father and herself. Through placing these sounds in conversation with one another, Granados emphasizes the power of music to recall and re-live memories and familial connections. At the same time, Granados considers the lasting capacity of sound waves to travel through space and time unperturbed. She integrates this cosmic perspective with a found radio, a broadcasting tool at the center of a “crocheted, celestial, spiraling form” emblematic of the eponymous Milky Way, in a gesture she describes as tying together an “intergenerational conversation, while simultaneously transcending any bounds of time.”
