Kazaan Viveiros

Ups and Downs, art deco inspired, geometric abstract painting on paper with gold

2021

Artist Kazaan Viveiros earned a BA with distinction from the University of Virginia in Studio Art and Religious Studies, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has since exhibited work in solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, including solo shows in New York, San Francisco, Berkeley, Scottsdale, AZ, Richmond, VA, and Savannah, GA. In 2003, curator Raffaella Guidobono gave Viveiros a show at TAD Concept Store in Rome. Viveiros’s paintings have been collected by a wide array of corporations, including eBay and Capital One Bank, as well as by individuals such as WalMart’s Rob Walton and novelist Danielle Steel. Her large diptych, The Whale, was purchased by Banner Children’s Hospital and currently hangs in their radiology ward. Summit Medical Group MD Anderson Cancer Center in New Jersey has many of her works in their collection. In addition, five of Viveiros’s paintings were purchased by the Art in Embassies Program and are permanently installed in the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She was a 2011 Bethesda Painting Awards semi-finalist, was twice chosen as a visiting artist at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, VA, and was twice an artist-in-residence at Weir Farm in Wilton, CT. Viveiros has also been an artist-in- residence at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in Southern California. In 2015, she became a Fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Artist Statement for “Passages” series: Using the language of geometry within a narrow framework, this work explores concepts of mechanics, natural phenomenon, ecology, and natural and designed systems. The forms within reference a varied list of sources, such as a pine cone that only releases seeds when a fire supplies sufficient heat, a pearl slowly forming within a bivalve shell, the surface of a strawberry, the warmth of sunlight, shifting power dynamics, or the concept of infinity and perpetual motion. The patterns could be meandering thoughts, reflections in water, tracks upon soil, handwritten messages, or leaves falling from trees. Yet each composition remains esoteric, firmly planted in abstraction. The external world is filtered through a personal lens. Representative works reveal transcendent qualities of creativity and the mechanisms of the natural world.