Kayla Dantz’s woven pictures maintain up a mirror to the “fragmented nature of memory”

We haven’t ever seen pictures like Kayla Dantz’s earlier than. Archival images and slides present in household albums have, in and of themselves, an inherently nostalgic high quality, and though this base materials informs the entire artist’s work, her items appear to cover one other layer of softness, homesickness or sentimentality between their rigorously threaded strains.

It may not be a shock to listen to that the artist’s distinctive method to photographic copy derives from a background in trend design at Parson’s School of Design, the place Kayla turned fluent in “handmade techniques like weaving, knitting, and embroidery”, she says. Crossing this information over into her different love – images, she has developed a way of deconstructing pictures digitally to re-assembles them with delicate hand weaving that evokes “the quiet, fragmented nature of memory”. Within this course of the artist has discovered a parallel between “the tactile slowness of craft traditions and the emotional immediacy of photography”.

Drawn most to non-public imagery for this apply – classic household images from the 60s and 70s, handed down from her grandparents – Kayla’s woven originals or customized items for shoppers all purpose to “explore how time distorts, preserves, and reshapes memory and identity, both symbolically and physically”, she says. “I see fabric as a medium of connection—threads crossing to make something whole—mirroring the emotional weaving that happens when we revisit the past.”

Much like her personal visible explorations, Kayla is impressed by works that discover household ties or the materiality of our reminiscences, but in addition takes influences from native surroundings and each day encounters, travelling round “always with my camera by my side”, she says. Much of the talent and sentiment that goes into her work was discovered proper at house: “both of my grandmothers taught me to knit and sew as a child, and my earliest photographs were of family members and the spaces we shared. Family photographs continue to move me deeply, shaping how I approach both craft and image-making today.”