FLUX 2021 - Baz Kanold

Email: bazkanold@gmail.com
Website: http://www.bazkanold.com
Instagram: @artbybaz
Twitter: @artbybaz

Baz Kanold is a mixed media artist whose artwork is an investigation and celebration of queerness, sexuality, and the fluidity of gender identity. Their current project is focused around the concept of gender dysphoria, and the difficulties of having your mind and body being in opposition to one another. While they are a mixed media artist, there is a focus on oil painting, conté or pencil on paper, and digital drawing. Over the course of the pandemic, they have been exploring digital art more consistently and is the main medium for their Dysphoria series, which will be featured in the Flux Exhibition.

Artist Statement

Our lives are heavily dictated by binaries, especially in the realms of sexuality and gender. As someone who lives outside of these spectrums—a queer, non-binary person—most of my work reflects the push and pull of navigating the grey areas that exist between. This exploration often accumulates in pieces that are filled with contrasts that try to express the beauty and, more frequently, the loneliness of living in-between and outside of societal norms.  

This series focuses on one aspect of living in a trans body: gender dysphoria. To me, gender dysphoria is a form of aberration, a deviance, a glitch. The body and the mind war with each other using the body as a battleground. Gender dysphoria is, in itself, a contrast of connection and disassociation from parts of the body. Because of that, this series of digital paintings encapsulates contrast in several forms. The realistic and the abstract, the fragmented and the complete, the visible and invisible, and the new-age and the traditional all make appearances across these different pieces. 

Working in digital, I capture the concept of aberration and glitching in its truest form. These flickers of pixels and bars add a layer of confusion and uncertainty, a questioning of one’s self. These digital artworks each focus on specific parts disconnected from the whole, patchworked together with pieces that don’t seem to fit. 

Interview

How have your lived experiences informed your artistic practice?  

The body has always been my preferred subject matter. I’ve only ever been interested in capturing human forms. In that way, I would almost say that my artistic practice almost helped to inform my lived experience, just as much as the other way around. As I began to explore my gender identity later in life, my love of the human form throughout my life has really allowed me to manage my gender dysphoria in unique ways, and that gender dysphoria has also become a huge theme within my current work. My art informs my experience of my life and my life informs my art.

What does your work aim to say?

My most current work, the Dysphoria series, specifically focuses on my own experience of gender dysphoria. It alludes to the confusion, inconsistencies, and loneliness that can come of not fully understanding the feelings you have in regard to your own body. I hope that those who experience dysphoria can see some of their own experience represented in my work, and for those who don’t get a small sense of the feeling that gender dysphoria can elicit.  

What are your plans for the future? How do you see your work evolving?

While my current series focusses on one of the more difficult parts of being a gender non-conforming person, I hope that more of my art in the future can focus on queer and trans* joy. I want to make work that focusses on the beauty of the queer experience, not just the difficulties that we face. Our trauma and suffering are valid, but our joy and our bodies should be celebrated. I want to carve out a space that allows trans* and queer bodies to be seen as beautiful, desirable, and resilient.