Kat Flyn

White Man's Burden

2021

Kat Flyn is a self-taught assemblage artist working presently out of San Diego. She began her career as a costume designer in Southern California. Over the years she amassed a trove of artifacts and collectibles which she began using to create assemblage art in the 1990s. In 2000 she sold her business and moved to Cuyamaca, a remote community in the mountains outside of San Diego to devote herself exclusively to her artwork. In 2003, her work was interrupted when the Cedar Fire swept through San Diego County and destroyed the forest, her home and studio along with almost all of her collections and works of art. Following the fire, she relocated to San Francisco, where she spent a decade concentrating on her art in her studio in SOMA and exhibiting at galleries in the Bay Area. In 2015, she returned to San Diego and now works out of her studio in La Jolla, exhibiting there and in Los Angeles. Flyn refers to herself as an Assemblage Sculptor and her works as Political Art or Protest Art. She separates herself from other assemblage artists in that she only employs saved as opposed to found objects in her work; and her pieces always have a political or cultural narrative to them rather than being surreal or abstract. She also constructs or refashions many of the pieces which she uses in her art, a soft drink box into a tenement building (Affordable Housing 2017), a jewelry box into a wheelchair (Last Lily Foot 2016), an old shoe shine box into a hearse (Katrina 2018). The result is her work is closer in appearance to Folk Art than Assemblage Art.