Gracianne Kirsch research memory and time using a blend of drawing, poetry, and installation, and video. Their work operates in queer temporalities, grounded in queer theory, especially the writings of Paul Preciado, S Bear Bergman, Andrea Lawlor, Jack Halberstam and more. Kirsch's art embraces a nonlinear understanding of time. They draw on recollections of the body and land, working toward creating a trans-dimensional exploration of memory and identity.
Kirsch grew up on the top of a mountain, on an off-the-grid homestead, their closest neighbors an hour away. They developed an entangled relationship to land, relying heavily on the woods for companionship. Often their work confronts this strange upbringing, in remembering, in re-remembering. Their work is partly autobiographical.
While the linework of Kirsch's drawings tends to focus on bodies and interiors, Kirsch's relationship to mountain, city, and town can be found in the textural build up and removal of material. The soft skies and the murky puddles.
The figures in their drawings and videos are often restrained by gravity, stretching down, slouching, or laying. Figures are heavy at rest, holding their own weight, holding the burden of memory, holding the force of trans selfhood, holding affliction to the body. When figures are caught naked, in bed, at home, they pose for an audience, in performance or in a visual exchange, sharing space with viewers. Importantly, embedded throughout Kirsch's research and practice are moments of silliness and sweetness.
Kirsch's videos are a scattered collection of interactions, functioning like poems in their structure. They capture performance and play in a disparate and curious exploration of the body’s emotional relationship to object and space. Objects in a cluster are like people in a family. Space is non-fixed, it floats, like unstuck time, like a memory. Rooms fold and dissolve and merge, like a dream or an unsteered fantasy.
Time is this big unruly thing: it expands, hardly restrained. To queer time in Kirsch's art is to study this expansion, to record the disrupted bodies, objects, and places in time’s wake.
Kirsch is an Oakland-based artist. They received their BA in Art Practice and Social Welfare at University of California Berkeley in 2022, and their MFA in Art Studio from University of California Davis in 2024.
Kirsch's work has been exhibited at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art (Davis), Sausalito Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Center, 120710 Gallery (Berkeley), East Bay Creative Lab (Oakland), Pence Gallery (Davis), Worth Ryder Gallery (Berkeley) and more. Kirsch is a July 2026 Artist-in-Residence at Winslow House Project in Vallejo and a May 2027 Artist-in-Residence at Kala in Berkeley. Kirsch was a participant of the Queer Ancestors Project in San Francisco. Kirsch is the recipient of the UC Davis inaugural Letters & Science Award for Excellence, the Fay Nelson Award, and the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Award from BAMPFA. Read more about Kirsch's work on Letters and Science Magazine.
