Kayla Witt (she/her, b. 1994, Calgary, AB, Canada) is a Los Angeles based artist who explores contemporary anxieties surrounding place and space, both domestic and urban.
By redrafting the artists photographs, as well as found images from the Internet, magazines, Google Maps, and texts, Witt creates fantastical collage-based paintings which are at times unsettling. With an awareness of the paradox of Pop sensibility, she explores and combines the underlying dark side of place and space with a wry humor taking the viewer below the surface of the seemingly obvious. As details register and accumulate, it becomes apparent that there is tension between comfort and discomfort in her assembled places, which are both mundane and banal, yet surreal and uncanny.
She also makes sculptures, installations and videos. Interested in the socio-political and cultural notions of home, the nefarious side of commodified wellness, and the revolving door of psychic healers in Los Angeles, Witt spends about 15 hours per week in her car exploring and acquainting herself with her new home of California.
Witt received her MFA from the University of Waterloo in 2020, and her BFA from OCAD University in 2016. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including shows at Sow & Tailor (Los Angeles, CA), WOAW Gallery (Hong Kong, China), Critical Distance Centre for Curators (Toronto, ON, Canada), Bunker 2 Contemporary Art Container (Toronto, ON, Canada), among others. She has been artist-in-residence at Otis College of Art and Design (Los Angeles, CA), and Struts Gallery (Sackville, NB).