About

Bio.

Kayla Cantu is an artist and educator whose work questions perceptions of identity, unruly bodies, and ideas surrounding normality and abnormality. Her work utilizes photographic, video, and sculptural processes to parallel glass properties to human capability. Kayla earned her BFA from West Texas A&M University and her MFA in Glass from Rochester Institute of Technology. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at places such as the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, the Delaware Contemporary, the Museum of American Glass, and has been featured in publications such as New Glass Review and SuboArt Magazine. She been awarded residences and fellowships at Pittsburgh Glass Center and WheatonArts. She resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where she pursues her artistic practice and is faculty within the glass program at Temple University, Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

Artist Statement

I am a fat female, biracial, queer artist and educator who utilizes glass, video, photography, and mixed media. My work considers curiosities of discomfort relating to unruly bodies—or bodies that society has traditionally deemed as not “normal.” By drawing from personal experience, referencing societal standards, and by paralleling chosen materials to human capability, my practice reconsiders senses of discomfort I have for the self both psychologically and physically. Bulging fat, fleshy folds, ooze, orifices, timelines of bodies, and the psychological need to contain one’s perception are some of the curiosities I explore within my practice. Although my work references my body, I do not ask others to experience my work as me. I ask others to reflect what they see back onto themselves by reconsidering materials, what they recognize before them, and how they perceive physicality. Through subject matter, material, and installation, my work considers what it’s like to walk the fine line of being human, put vulnerabilities out there for others to see, and accept the unruliness we all exist with.