Kyoko Cole (°1981, Los Angeles) creates mixed media artworks, paintings, drawings and sculptures. By applying abstraction, Kyoko intends the viewer to become part of the work as an added component. Art as entertainment for Cole means the ability to touch, as well as to interact with the work, a key aspect of her art.

I create expressive, layered artwork that blends texture, emotion, and symbolism…

Her mixed media works are dreamlike images in which fiction and reality collide; well-known tropes converge, meaning shifts, past and present collapse. Time and memory are vital motifs for Kyoko. By applying poetic and often metaphorical language, she encourages astonishment for the viewer, her compositions of abstract settings and poetic images have traces of memory, and balance on the edge of recognition and alienation.

Kyoko’s work dwells in the soul’s attempt to visualize reality through the desperate human desire to communicate, attempt at dialogue, the dissonance between form and content, and the dysfunction of language. Ambiguity is a key element in her work, through which Kyoko engages the viewer with the dynamic tension of objectified emotion, daring the viewer to investigate the dualities that develop in varying dimenions and interpretations.

Her works are given improper functions; significations are inversed and form and content merge. Shapes are dissociated from their structure, exposing the system in which they function. Unequivocality is shattered and disseminate endlessly. By placing the viewer on the wrong track, she creates works where the actual event has yet to take place or has just ended: moments evoke atmosphere and suspense that are not part of a narrative thread. The drama unfolds elsewhere, while the build-up of tension is frozen to become a memory that will never take place.

Kyoko’s works are both touchingly beautiful and painfully alluring, leaving us orphaned with conflicting feelings and thoughts. In a search for new methods to ‘read the city’, she creates intense personal moments masterfully created by means of rules and omissions, acceptance and refusal, leading the viewer round and round in circles.

Energy… heat, light, water, space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways, sometimes absurdly. By investigating language on a meta level, she often creates several works that seem identical, upon which thoughts that have apparently just been developed are manifested; notes are made and crossed out, ‘mistakes’ are repeated. The results are a deconstruction and shifting of meaning, expanding the work into multifaceted interpretations.