Kai Brady

I am fascinated with movements, rituals, and color codes. I work across mediums; embroidery, watercolor, oil paint, screen printing, video, graphite, and photo. Being a multi-disciplinary artist has influenced me profoundly and has made me more aware of what happens when I explore other ways of working and how it informs my work. One of my recent projects ’ titled Map of my Neighborhood consists of a series of photos that were taken on a 15 minute walk that I take to the bus everyday. They overlap one another and are manipulated to obstruct the viewers of the original photo. I then did a second iteration where I bought shirts from the local thrift store and mapped out my eye movement from each photo with thread onto the shirts. The way the eye moves around a photo that has been obstructed has become fascinating to me because one is able to track another’s act of looking rather than the static nature of seeing and naming what one sees.

My work focuses on how I feel internally and gives me a way to react, making my work vulnerable for others to see because it’s a reflection of me. In a lot of my pieces, I research language that resonates with me, working to understand each terms history. From there I decide what medium(s) I should work with. In my project titled Mind, I use two old t-shirts sewn together with different colored thread, resulting in a multi-colored swirl through the shirts. Each color references certain emotions, cultural stereotypes, and iconic social reference points, resulting in a mind-map of sorts. For two weeks I recorded my feelings everyday and sewed them on the shirts with the colored thread that matched them best based off of that emotion. In another photo series One Body, One you, I documented the body movements that people make in a studio setting. I compared body types to see what others do, and what others would not do. I overlapped five photos together of each model and painted each body movement on Grafix dura-lar paper with watercolor. I then put each transparent/translucent piece of the dura-lar paper together on a lightbox to highlight the body movement and the paint movements.

For my thesis, I’ve decided to step outside of my comfort zone of art and document COVID in Cook County Jail. Throughout this process I’ve had the opportunity to meet those who have loved ones inside of CCJ and those who have lost loved ones in CCJ due to COVID. I’ve found a protest that happens every Sunday that is held by Cassandra Greer-Lee outside of Division 10 in CCJ where they play music and have special guests that perform for the inmates. Cassandra lost her husband Nick to COVID on Easter Sunday this past April in CCJ. I’ve conducted interviews to get more insight of what is happening and how COVID is being treated in there as well as how those not involved with CCJ simply do not care or are not aware of what is happening.