Kay is an experimental animator exploring dreamscapes, the subconscious, and abstract spaces. As an animator, they have always been interested in horror and the fears that permeate our subconscious thoughts. In going forth with these ideas, they hope to create new and strange worlds for a viewer to venture forth in. Their work is a presentation of dreams in reality through animation that goes beyond our earthly realm. They have expanded upon those ideas in an attempt to manifest the strange creatures in our minds as reality.
theater #111, 2022, digital animation, 4:21
A person in a red space looks off to the side, with a light above their head.
below the mountain, 2020, digital animation, 2:36
A car going down a road illuminates the trees around it.
again, 2020, digital animation, video alteration, 0:38
An abstract, distorted image comprising of a vaguely humanoid shape and yellow circles.
I have always been fascinated by worlds that are beyond our own, venturing deeper into the landscape of the subconscious, dream spaces, places of transformation, and darkness. Animation is the center in my body of work, and I use this medium because of its power to build otherworldly places that an audience can step into for a few fleeting moments. I am interested in surreal and abstracted environments, and am eager to explore and create spaces where strange and fantastical stories can unfold and reach people on a psychological level.
In my work, fragments and images that unfold come from my hand intuitively, and I like to trust the physical act of drawing to make my films come to life. My identity as both queer and as a person of color have shaped and informed the experiences I want to convey to others through my work. Certain facets of my character are translated through my hand—the softness of touch, my quiet voice, and my desire to have an empathic relationship with my viewer.
This empathy feels most possible through journeys of fear, manifested in darkness and uncertainty. I have tried to visualize these moments in the corners and crevices that my characters crawl through in my work. Stories about both escapism and fear delight and frighten me, and that is the same kind of reaction I wish to incite in an audience—the transformative possibility in trauma and getting to the other side. In creating the shifting and abstracted worlds that I do, I want to create points of connection in these places of alienation, to make experimental and narrative animated films that are intriguing and strange, but with points of relation.