Standing proudly at the intersection of design, zoology, and surrealist imagery, “morphing anthropology and ecology” in large-scale “dreamscape” canvases, the paintings of Kayleen Berry bear witness to her identity as “diasporican.” Born in the Bronx, now based between rural Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, and New York City, Berry returns to Manhattan, the city of her birth, with a duo exhibition on view April 9-May 30 at Taller Boricua, 121 East 106th Street. Reception: Thursday, April 10, 6-9 p.m.
The artist’s day job as a textile print and pattern designer supports her main loves: drawing and painting, skills she’s displayed since kindergarten, when her teacher challenged the class to draw a dog, and Berry made a beeline for the chalkboard. Her paintings are essentially decorative fabric designs, writ large. “I teeter between fiber arts and traditional painting, and want to find a way to mix them together,” the artist says. Although dogs don’t currently take center stage in her work, several other species do. “I find animals everywhere,” says the guardian of two rescued dogs and a parrot, whose vibrant green plumage is often perched upon Berry’s shoulder.
Her own skin a canvas in itself, lavishly adorned with tattoos, the artist communes creatively with creatures great and small: from frogs and salamanders to enormous equines. Her painting Sweeter Than Sugarcane conveys the disturbing phenomenon of Puerto Rico’s abandoned horses. The myriad fauna Berry paints read as symbols of human feelings and failings; they are us, and we, them. “We are not superior to animals just because they don’t speak,” Berry observes.
Contemplating the images conjured by her brush, what springs to mind isn’t other artists (although she admires many, from Salvador Dali to James Turrell); this artist’s true kindred spirits are in fact, environmentalists. Berry’s kindred creative spirits are, in fact, environmentalists. Like Jane Goodall, one of her heroines, the artist offers to speak on animals’ behalf. She has collaborated with the Caribbean Primate Research Center, which studies the species with which we humans share 94 percent DNA, “humanely, in cognitive ways,” Berry emphasizes, “observing their behavior instead of dissecting their brains.” In her painting Warning Sign, an open-jawed macaque, teeth bared, may be interpreted as one stressed-out individual’s primal scream—or animal lovers’ justified rage at the laboratory animal-testing machine.
Berry’s vibrant palette—notably, a particularly vivid shade of pink—gives bystanders hope that humanity still has a chance to change things for the better, to work toward a rosier future even in the face of growing global cynicism. “I want people to ask more questions, to learn more,” concludes the artist. G&S
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