BIO
Emiland Kray, is a visual artist working primarily with book arts and game design to investigate the complexities and fallacies of memories and dreams by manipulating our attachment to nostalgic and familiar patterns. Many of his artworks evolve from transforming his dream journals and childhood memories into inky and mysterious forms. He began his artistic career by living and working in Las Vegas, Nevada and received his BFA from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2020. That same year, he began his MFA at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He has participated in group shows nationally since 2016 and has had solo shows across Nevada and in Arizona. Since graduating with his MFA in the Spring of 2023 Kray continues making art with a focus on community involvement and works to support myriad nonprofits and artist groups in the South West United States. As his career develops, so too does his desire to work collaboratively and involve more intersectional voices within his artistic practice. Much of his recent work aims to support teams of artists both financially and through communal practices of skill and story sharing.
"50 Days of Remembering", watercolor on paper, 50 individual studies of remembering on 2"x6.5" paper, 2021.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My artwork poses questions about the mechanics of how we remember – the complexity that exists within those entangled systems. I visually introduce instances of slippage in our recollection of the past and the decay of memory towards nostalgia. Through my work, I gather and sift through intangible archives: dreams, nightmares, and memories themselves to find how these essences make statements about the importance of memory but also the futility and temperance of life.
I use the systems of remembering hidden within the body to make statements about identity, fear, and longing but also to search for the morphology of nostalgia. With a combination of watercolor, ink, game design, and book arts I create tension between the real and the surreal and uncanny. This combination disrupts the recognizability of the archive and thus also disrupts the stability and the seductive nostalgic essence of the past. These techniques pose the past as questionable, memory as simulation, and evidence as incomplete. My work seeks to make visible our growing pains and to reject comfort in the notion of a perfect genesis.