Kaylah Dawkins

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

My work explores identity, memory, culture, and legacy, particularly the ways people maintain connections to home, family, and heritage across generations and distance. Working across photography, film, portraiture, and documentary storytelling, I am interested in the stories we inherit, the ones we preserve, and the ones we choose to pass forward. Much of my practice begins with people. Through portraiture and conversation, I create work that considers how personal experiences can become part of a larger cultural archive. I am especially drawn to the relationship between diaspora and home, examining how culture is remembered, adapted, and carried by people living between places and identities. Projects such as Pictures Last Forever consider photography as a form of preservation, an object that can hold a person's presence, history, and story beyond a single moment. To Yaad From Abroad expands this exploration into questions of migration, belonging, and cultural memory, documenting the experiences of immigrants and their descendants and their evolving relationships with the places they call home. My background in creative production and art direction also influences how I construct images. Color, movement, environment, fashion, and the body become tools for communicating emotion and creating visual narratives that feel both considered and lived-in. Ultimately, I see my practice as a form of visual archiving. I create to preserve people and their stories to make images that...

Artwork