Kim Garcia

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

My practice begins with hauntings: unresolved experiences that persist as bodily tensions, quiet griefs, and inherited longings. Working across sculpture, painting, and drawing, I use layering, compression, and accumulation to explore how history takes form and is reshaped across generations. As the daughter of immigrants, I approach history as something active and living: shifting, camouflaging, and carried through the body. I work with resin, necklace chains, and embedded imagery to build translucent structures that suspend and strain fragments of lived experience. Resin both preserves and distorts, while chains introduce tension, weight, and inherited dependence. These materials in my work create an unstable archive, where preservation and erosion operate at once. I move from intimate memory outward, connecting personal experience with broader histories of migration, empire, and displacement. Recent work rooted in my father’s dementia and his desire to return to the Philippines has led me into family archives tied to the early American presence in the region. Personal memory folds into colonial history. Intimate grief opens up onto geopolitical inheritance. Moving between small, intimate objects and large-scale sculptural works, I create environments and vignettes that invite viewers to consider America as a place shaped by layered arrivals, contested belonging, and unfinished histories.

Artwork