Artist Statement
Carving out her career as a multi-disciplinary artist, Kayla Shears is a sonic explorer who garnered international recognition through music production and DJing over an entire decade. Equally obtaining recognition in academia, she graduated with distinction and has been the recipient of 5 grants and awards since 2017 for her level of excellence in the music field and commitment to community work and solution-oriented projects. Honing in the craft of creating dynamic and memorable experiences, she now expands her abilities as a frequency-architect, designing and creating immersive audio-visual environments by fostering interactive impressions through prosthetic reality, digital arts, music, multimedia art installations, sound design for film, abstract visual arts, creative writing and other forward thinking endeavours.
Her cross-disciplinary practice is a conduit for creative circuitry between sound design, intermedia and music technology, a pathway towards connection and uncompromised freedom. Her projects are outlets, evolving her out of daily constraints, translating social languages that are not her cognitive mother-tongue. She calls her practice “digital impressionism,” bending light and sculpting frequency to create environments, showcasing new ways to observe worlds of neurodivergence, intermedia, visual arts and music technology. Rejecting the rigid rules of neuro-normative society and traditional methods of audio creation, her work has a unique focus on free-form sound composition and mapping design.
Her personal collections primarily challenge complexity and polarity, framed by her atypical way of seeing the world.
Her professional focus brings out the details of her & her collaborator's vision for the project or commission with excellent communication, while delivering the importance of the overall goal with exceptional quality and clarity.
She walks boldly with the intent to make the audience think and feel more deeply about themselves or the world around them.
Our world is polarized. The human condition is what burdens or blesses us with such great distinction. With our condition, and endless debates around the complexes of morality, such formalities of our evolution on this planet can only bear more questions than we often have answers for. As humans are holistic by nature, we seek grounding and stability, community and acceptance. Our souls thrive on such experiences and it is innately up to us to co-create them. The question that inspires most projects is asking myself: what happens if collectivism and conformity replaces individuality, personal greatness and uniqueness?
I find that there is a gap lengthening within our social dialects and a deafening silence rises upon us. Media is bought and sold to cater to our differences instead of leading us to states of true indifference and tolerance of new ideas or other opinions. I often discuss the polarizing nature of "belonging" and reflect on the depth that's missing from most discourse. I want to tell stories and share perspectives that are often avoided in today’s socio-political climate. Complexity is often left in disarray, which is where art draws its own lines and ironically imposes a structure to allow depth to be created where it would otherwise remain illusive.
Truly profound things happen when we accept complexity into the space and reflect on our inner world- albeit through art or even basic conversation. This extended quest in expressing such humanness ultimately helps me decide how to connect, in the hopes that my art will sustain new conversations about our ‘place’ in this volatile world. Unifying polarity doesn't ask us to remove our differences, but instead beckons us to sharpen the details in-between the extremes that are too often blocked out because of fear, or comfort zones never left.