Kaylan in her converted garage studio in Fort Wayne, IN, 2022
About
Kaylan Buteyn’s work investigates physical representations of generational care through paintings, quilts, domestic textiles, abstraction and collage. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at galleries that include Peep Space in Tarrytown, NY, Ground Floor Gallery in Nashville, TN, Janice Charach Gallery in Detroit, MI, Spilt Milk in Edinburgh, Scotland, among others. She has been the recipient of artist grants from the Indiana Arts Commission and Metro Arts Nashville and her work has been featured in publications including Milked Mag and Create Magazine.
In 2019, as a social extension of her art practice, Kaylan founded the Artist/Mother Podcast, sharing interviews of working artists who are mothers. Kaylan has spent the last 7 years facilitating community for artists in many forms including creating exhibition opportunities for artists worldwide, organizing a critique group program for hundreds of participants, facilitating virtual programming, in-person artist retreats and more. Kaylan is the founder of the Kinhouse Artist Residency and co-directs Kinhouse Gallery in Fort Wayne, IN. She holds a BA in Communications and a BA in Studio Art from Houghton College and an MFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art. She lives with her partner and their 3 children in Fort Wayne, IN.
Artist Statement:
The art I make functions as portals; linking people, places and perceptions. I believe materials hold memory and through my art practice I investigate physical representations of generational care. My process is multi-faceted including quilting, sewing, painting, dying, gluing, stitching and more; creating layered compositions often stretched as paintings, built up on panels, or installed as hanging quilts. I include domestic textiles from my Grandmother’s generation that root the work in the past but I combine them with the language of paint and abstraction in a modern way. Bold color and heavily applied paint juxtaposes ripped, faded and torn fabric. The work serves as an investigation of knowing, of rooting, of finding – myself, my memories, my mother, aunts and grandmothers. How can one life deteriorate as another begins? How do generations intertwine and intersect? Can color and fabric combine in ways that reflect notions of our future and past selves? How do beings exist in overlapping segments of time and space, like textiles collaged or sewn together, old and new? I am cultivating a collective knowing, a continual conversation, and investigating my generational legacy through craft, textile, paint and collage.
