Kiana Thayer (b. 1996, Providence, RI) is interested in you, in us, in our material and immaterial human experience. Using human-made images, iconography, and design thinking Thayer examines both the contradictory, and kismet happenings that present themselves within the cosmic, human, and natural world. Working with plural realities and relational meaning making their practice teeters on the edge of fiction and truth, examining the external and internal worlds we have, aspire to have, and refuse.

Using the materiality and semiotics of a book Thayer’s work sits somewhere between infographic and visual essay. Throughout the last decade as a practicing book designer, they have always questioned the form of a book. By flattening the content onto a singular plane, they introduce a nonlinear reading experience, encouraging double thinking and reimagination. 

Over the last handful of years Thayer has been pulled to academic collage as a way of building narrative through proximity, sequencing, and repetition. Their practice utilizes an-archiving a method which encourages the re-imagination or decontextualization of an image. Putting it back into circulation with an alternate perspective or intention.

Photographs are portals into other worlds, and they are everywhere: in magazines, on the internet, in books, on white walls. The image is a point of hallucination, a dream you can jump into, a place that is neither here nor there, an open field of possibilities. It is a practice of expanding your perspectives and suspending disbelief.