Born and bred Army Brat, Kytana Winn self identifies as being a loyal daughter, an eccentric sister, an old soul, and most importantly a creative just trying to consistently create.
In the spring of 2017, she graduated from Linfield College with a Bachelor’s in Studio Arts & a minor in Art History. Kytana is now living the post-grad life as a civil servant for the state of California.
Her first love is and will always be Black & White portraiture photography, but her desire to explore the Black female body within Afro-futuristic concepts has her dedicating her primary practice to paper/digital collage. Please follow Kytana on Instagram @kytanawinnart for insights behind her artistic practice as a whole and the collages she creates.
EXPLORATIONS OF AFROFUTURISM:
It wasn’t until after Kytana entered post-grad life and began re-evaluating her approach to her overall artistic practice, that she truly committed to the surprisingly inexpensive medium of collage. She had already been contemplating the ideas of The Divine Feminine in Space, Black feminism, future-past, and Pan African Diaspora identities after reading Yatasha Womack's Afrofuturism: The world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture. However, Kytana didn't feel like her current medium, photography, could adequately address her new-found questions like, What would a divine feminine in space look like? What does the reconstruction of the black female body rooted in cybernetic evolution inspire? What kind of life-changing adventures can the Black female have in space? With these questions and visual inspiration from artists Joshua Mays, Lina Iris Viktor, Manzel Bowman, Taj Francis, Osborne Macharia, Tyra White Meadows and so many more notable artists, Kytana has begun to philosophically and visually approach the wonderfully lush world of Afrofuturism within my work.
Currently, Kytana has been unpacking these ideas through both digital and paper media. The individual images collected into a whole allow for a cohesive collage in which the viewer can find meaning both through the singular and the collective. Almost similar to that of a mural. To reiterate the open-ended narratives within her compositions, she forms the titles from the ends of short and incomplete narratives that accompany each piece, leading the reader through a stream of consciousness that abruptly ends without a definite end, encouraging the viewer to find their ...
