Kaylie Kaitschuck: A Million Miles Away

In the East Wing, Goldfinch is excited to present “A Million Miles Away,” a solo exhibition by Michigan-born and based artist Kaylie Kaitschuck.

Like a stickered skateboard or a backpack embellished with patches and pins, Kaitschuck’s embroideries balance the immediacy of everyday life with a nostalgic nod to the past. Each of her vivid dreamscapes, loaded with familiar symbols (suns, moons, animals, etc.) and iconography from popular culture, negotiate complicated desires to escape, shake loose old identities, and transcend familiar surroundings. “Each embroidery I create aims to capture the intangible quality of distance,” explains Kaitschuck. “My visual narratives convey the emotions and experiences associated with being far removed from a particular place, person, or state of being.” As she mines memory, familiar surroundings, and daydreams of being elsewhere, the works “become my own versions of maps or postcards,” says the artist. “They hold no real navigational route or reference to a specific place but my own. These are an archive of thought, routine, and familiarity.”

Reminiscent of I Spy books, puzzles, and comics, while engaged in a deep history of craft and technique, Kaitschuck’s works are a balancing act of kitsch and “low-brow” aesthetics and meticulous construction, stitch by stich. The vivid embroideries begin with simple drawings on felt, sketched quickly and intuitively in a single sitting. These drawings are later rolled up and fed through a long arm quilting machine, with only partial sections of the drawing visible at a time, as Kaitschuck stitches. As completed sections of the embroideries disappear and new portions are pulled forth through the machine, Kaitschuck engages in acts of forgetting and recollecting. In Kaitschuck’s words: “I collect icons from my every day, past experiences, and false memories. I’m shifting between the real and fake realities that intertwine in my mind.”

In the phrase, “A million miles away,” the subject of distance might be looking forward in time or glancing back in the past. This distance might exist in a single time and place, too. It can be felt in a relationship between people in the same room; it can refer to a feeling or state that can no longer be accessed. Like the exhibition title, each of Kaitschuck’s works is titled with a phrase that gestures at a longing to escape, transcend, or change, while the imagery is rooted in a sense of familiarity and regional specificity. While there is humor to be found in the works, along with a seductive chaos of color and form, Kaitschuck grounds her dreamscapes in the personal, all-too-human experience of longing for other worlds and lives, while living the ones we have.    

Artist's Bio

Kaylie Kaitschuck (b. 1995, Dearborn, MI) received her BFA from The College for Creative Studies and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Kaitschuck’s work has recently been exhibited in solo and two-person exhibitions at Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany; NADA New York (Gaa Gallery); Hiromart Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Baby Blue Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Playground Detroit, Detroit, MI. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI; Center Galleries, Detroit, MI; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI;  and SCOPE MIAMI (Playground Detroit), Miami, FL, among others. Kaitschuck is a recipient of the Detroit Artist Talent Fund, The Red Bull House of Arts Microgrant, The Robert C. Larson Art, Design, and Architecture Venture Award, and is published in New American Paintings Midwest and MFA Editions. She lives and works in Detroit, Michigan.