KYLA ZOE LUEDTKE   

Address:
1628 Jefferson Street
Madison, WI. 53711

Phone: 302.753.8490
Email: kyla.zoe@gmail.com
Website:www.portfolios.com/KylaZoe

 

Bio:

Born and raised in Newark, Delaware, Kyla Zoe Luedtke (until recently, Kyla Zoe Rafert) received her B.F.A. in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002.  Since then she has participated in numerous juried exhibitions nationally. Most recently these include the Washington Printmakers Gallery National Small Works Exhibition, in Washington, DC, the 22nd Annual International Exhibition, at Meadows Gallery at the University of Texas, and the 81st Annual International Competition: Printmaking, at the Print Center in Philadelphia. In 2004, she completed a five-month internship at the Women's Studio Workshop, a center for the promotion of women artists. There she developed her skills in bookbinding, papermaking, etching, photography and serigraphy. She has since returned to the Women's Studio Workshop for a residency in serigraphy. Additionally, Kyla has attended artists' residencies at The Vermont Studio Center, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the New York Mills Arts Retreat. Having began her graduate studies at the University of Delaware, she has since happily re-located to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, were she is currently pursuing her M.F.A in the Graphics, Printmaking area. Currently, Kyla's creative outlets include ink drawings, a combination of painting and serigraphy, and intaglio. Her plans after Graduation are yet to be determined.

 

 

Artist Statement:

Among many things, my current work explores the often subversive, yet formative influence of fairy tales on our social understandings of femininity. Fairy tales, like my work have always been selective, manipulative and double-edged. They reinforce the things that "make sense to us" (pretty ladies charm snakes, women can't be trusted, the heroin is almost always beautiful, innocence is bliss). In other words, as children, and even adults, over and over again, fairy tales (in this case fairy tales particular to my own childhood) lay a foundation by which we inadvertently define our concepts of beauty, corruption, innocence, love and consequence.

For a long time have maintained that our desire to live out fairy tales is far more permeated than we might readily admit. Particularly among girls and young women, there seems an almost embedded desire to re-enact the fantasies of our childhood dreams. This is evidenced in the movies we watch (the Princess Bride), the way we style our hair, the way we interact with one another, what we view as our strengths and weaknesses, what we expect from our partners, even what we wear for Halloween. Perhaps, once in adulthood most of these desires reflect our nostalgic optimism for youth and innocence more than the exactitude of our contemporary goals. Nonetheless, upon asking young women to pose, I am struck at the way their lapse into an imagined world seemed so intrinsically understood—- there is something so typically feminine and entrancing in how easily girls and women find comfort in their roles as princesses, sorceresses, and damsels in distress: I see it when I ask my subjects to pose: all young women remember that a fainting princess does not simply fall to the ground; she puts the back of her hand to her forehead, sighs, and spinning to flounce her imaginary skirts, collapses gracefully, face up, onto the linoleum floor.

Despite obvious ties to fairy tales, it is paramount that one recognizes these works are not simply an attempt to illustrate them. Rather, I approach my works as illustrations from a lost and unnamable tale.  That is, unlike fairy tales, my works allow only a momentary glimpse into an otherwise absent narrative.  Stubbornly irresolute, their interpretation allows for an enticing level of duplicity within my work that is pointedly uncharacteristic of fairy tales. Nowhere in my imagery, will the viewer enjoy the luxury of spoon fed conclusion; nowhere do I show the end of my story. Unlike fairy tales, in my work, it is unclear whether the patient, the honest, and the good win. In fact, more often than not, what the images witness, is the unraveling of such virtues. Laced with the combined elements of enticement, danger, duplicity, and frustrating ambivalence, with cunning beauty, delicate line, vulnerability, innocence, charm, these works are meant to epitomize and toy with our romantic interpretations of the feminine.