Kari Breitigam

Gallery Affiliations: Rule Gallery

Region: Midwest

Through my work I explore the complex nature of desire and obsession. We often have a love-hate relationship with the things we desire. This can become especially complicated when that which we desire is out of our reach or perhaps doesn’t even exist at all. Many of our most deeply ingrained desires develop in childhood and adolescence. My work often deals with this love-hate relationship with our childish delusions—the perfect life, the perfect home, the perfect relationship—that have always existed in our minds. The figures in my work nearly always come from magazines or catalogues. These are the unrealistic images and ideas people build their lives around. For adolescents, magazine pages have sentimental value; they get pinned up on walls or stored in special boxes. People identify with these images, no matter how irrational the identification is. It is my intention that my treatment of figures create a strange image that is decorative and feminized yet subtly surreal.