Pyramids of Love

Written by: Morgan @morganico_com & Katya Katya Kan

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Artist: Morgan @morganico_com

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I first met Katya Kan with a fellow artist/art show curator friend at the Chelsea Arts Club a couple of years ago via Ben Moore from the “Art Below” project that displays art in spaces previously occupied by advertising posters at Underground tube stations. From that moment I could tell she was a powerhouse of creativity & artistic productivity. She’s one of these people that makes everyone around her feel lazy, no matter how busy they are, as she always seems to have about 10 art shows on the go at once & is constantly popping up everywhere locally & globally like a real-life rabbit that’s carved a series of international rabbit warrens for herself to exhibit her prolific multimedia works in. 

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Her artistic output builds bridges between drawing, painting, performance, spoken word and film as well as NLP psychotherapy with her Virtual Girlfriend service she runs to help lonely souls to overcome their emotional/psychodynamic life traumas etc to find a new path of healing via her guidance & empathic nurturing.

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When I was asked to paint the panels on the 2nd Pyramid Of Love Kwame built last year during the BLM events to occupy the empty plinth previously housing a slave trader statue I was thinking about whom to depict on each side, & who would make a good Goddess Of The East. I decided to collaborate with a couple of female friends that symbolise real-life goddesses to me on 1 panel (to ensure this project included the creative energy of 2 strong female role model artists/achievers/manifesters of the magic in our day to day lives) & concentrate my efforts on the remaining 3 panels. Having recently crossed paths with Katya Kan she made quite an impact on me so I thought collaborating with her as the model for the eastern goddess would be beneficial to everyone as she seems to possess supernatural powers & has a unique perspective & cultural heritage to draw upon symbolising a melting pot of backgrounds informing her status as a world citizen & mission to break boundaries & embody female empowerment as she explores what it means to be human. Plus she’s always dressed as a rabbit for some reason.  

 

Katya Kan says:

“An idiosyncratic specimen of globalization, I was born in Almaty, Kazakhstan, my father being North Korean and my mother is Russian. Having caught a glimpse of the ex-USSR, I have a nostalgic, conflicting perception of political and cultural systems. Devoid of a homeland, I focus my art on the themes of ethnical atomization, emptiness and nostalgia. Unable to fully assimilate into any one culture, I find myself as an outsider with an eclectic artistic taste. Art represents the act of seeking, assembling and immortalizing beauty. Through my artistic practice, I recreate the state of inspiration and emancipation, experienced during my childhood. My works strive to capture the ephemeral impressions. The concepts, which I explore in my work, include globalization, surveillance, nostalgia, utopia and eroticism.

 

Recently, I was involved in initiatives with the ICA and the Soho Revue in London, UK; Untitled Space and New York Art Expo in NYC, SCOPE Miami, the Pacific Design Center and the Other Art Fair in Los Angeles as well as TSE Art Destination and Esentai Gallery in Kazakhstan as well as the Nikolskaya Gallery in Moscow amongst other art collectives”