Keira Kotler

Keira Kotler grew up in Boston and graduated from Columbia before moving west at the end of the 1990s and settling in the Bay Area. Her paintings and photographs have been shown widely in California and in Santa Fe and New York.

“I am drawn to the beauty of color and to the arresting purity it possesses when separated from form and context,” Kotler has written about her photographs, which are shot outdoors, but whose subjects are entirely unrecognizable. “I’m out in the world seeing color, having an experience around it,” she says, “and my work is more about that experience than about the object itself. Associations with the object can take away from the experience.” What may have been the back of a sweatshirt or a construction cone, shot full frame and printed straight color, becomes, when presented to us out of focus, simply color and light playing through space.