Hello you.
Goodbye year!
This is the KFX Studio: End-of-Year Recap
This year, organized by roses and thorns.
(buckle up)
(beep beep)
🌹
This year : a new beginning emerged
This year I received two grants from Creative Pinellas / Floridarama and The City of St. Petersburg to produce and complete Quiet at Heart.
Inspired by Joy Williams’ essay of the same name, Quiet at Heart was an immersive video installation that offered a counter-narrative to Florida’s loudest portrayals, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in a Florida that is subtle, surreal, and often at odds with herself. Drawing from over a decade of intimate archival footage, it was both a love letter and call to attention — a meditation on what Florida truly is, and what it stands to lose.
The project was special, with the most meaning coming from connecting with the local artist and art organizations in St. Petersburg (shout out to Margaret, Maggie, Todd, Roman, LeRoy and Kristen!). It is not easy living in Florida while working in the arts, and being able to connect with this community through this project was the highlight of the year.
🌹
This year: a dream came true.
Bringing video art into hospitals.
If you’ve been following my practice, you know that the video of my birth was the catalyst that propelled me into the world of artmaking. A consistent topic of interest over the last 15 years, it was the impetus for my endless research into memory, media, and manipulation.
My thesis in graduate school was titled Trying to Remember Being Born. It resulted in a two room installation - one uncanny waiting room and one uncanny womb-space. The latter included a gynecological exam chair with the video of my birth playing on the stirrups. This, engulfed in an ocean of red velvet. The most used word surrounding the project was: surreal.
Not as surreal as this moment:
The moment in which you were notified that one of your video artworks would be playing inside the birthing room at Brown University’s Hospital for Women and Children in Providence, RI.
The levels to this layering of coincidence are hard to pin down, so let’s hone in on the fact that there are hospitals integrating art into the birthing rooms as a means to support high quality birth care. Hospitals, doctor’s offices, and more of the same are places that often trigger anxiety and if we can get more art into these spaces, it can transform the health care experience.
If you know of any health care curators and/or spaces that would be open to incorporating video art - please send them this way.
🥀
This year : a devastation.
My muse left us.
Mariel Keaton Clark passed on October 18 2025.
If you know anything about me, you know she meant everything to me.
This year has been defined by this loss.
🥀
This year Florida broke me.
This year Creative Pinellas was defunded.
It was operatic, from beginning to end.
The cruelty of the impossible timeline. The strength of the local art community. The control of the godforsaken government. The empathy and lack thereof. The amount of people who showed up. The viscerality of the impact of the arts.The total devastation of the result. The significance of people coming together.
For those of you who are unfamiliar - here is the opera explained in a paragraph:
“Creative Pinellas, the county-designated local arts agency since 2011, was largely defunded in the 2025 Pinellas County budget after a 5–2 vote by county commissioners. The county cut roughly $1.2 million in annual funding—mostly tourism tax dollars—arguing that the organization did not generate enough measurable tourism impact and that arts funding should instead be restructured into a competitive arts-tourism grant program managed by Visit St. Pete-Clearwater. The decision came despite strong public opposition from artists and residents, many of whom spoke at commission meetings in support of Creative Pinellas. As a result, the organization faced staff layoffs, canceled programs, and plans to close its gallery and offices, creating major uncertainty for the local arts ecosystem and the future of centralized arts support in Pinellas County.”
The main issue here being that all the funding is going to an ‘arts-tourism grant project’ to be run by the tourism department. Not by artists or curators or galleries or museums or arts nonprofits – the tourism department. This means all the funding will be going to art that is aimed at promoting tourism. This leaves the local art community - the artists who actually live in the city that is being promoted as an art city - with next to nothing. It is (I’ve never used this word before) despicable.
After a year of working closely with Creative Pinellas and being able to grow my arts business to an all time through the connections that they created, we are feeling gutted.
Big shoutout to Jennifer Ring for all the journalistic research and information dissemination. Read more about it via her articles here.
