Gracianne Kirsch
Instagram: @graciannekirsch
Venmo: @graciannek
Website: http://graciannekirsch.com
Bio: Gracianne Kirsch is an Oakland-based artist researching queer temporalities and non-linear ways of knowing, using drawing, painting, poetry, video, and installation. Kirsch pulls from bodily memory and recollections of home/land, working toward creating a trans-dimensional exploration of identity and place. Kirsch received their BA in Art Practice and Social Welfare at University of California Berkeley in 2022, and their MFA in Art Studio from the Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio program at University of California Davis in 2024. Kirsch has exhibited at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art (Davis), Worth Ryder Gallery (Berkeley), East Bay Creative Lab (Oakland), Berkeley Art Center, 120710 Gallery (Berkeley). Kirsch’s writing has been published twice in Makeshift Magazine. Kirsch is a July 2026 artist resident at Winslow House Project in Vallejo and a May 2027 artist resident at Kala in Berkeley.
Statement: I research memory and time using a blend of drawing, poetry, and installation, and video. My work operates in queer temporalities, grounded in queer theory, particularly the writings of Paul Preciado, S Bear Bergman, Andrea Lawlor, Jack Halberstam and more. My art and I embrace a nonlinear understanding of time. I draw on recollections of the body and land, working toward creating a trans-dimensional exploration of memory and identity. I grew up on the top of a mountain, on an off-the-grid homestead, our closest neighbors an hour away. I developed an entangled relationship to land, relying heavily on the woods for companionship. Often my work confronts this strange upbringing, in remembering, in re-remembering. My work is partly autobiographical. While the linework of my drawings tends to focus on bodies and interiors, my 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 my 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 my research and practice are moments of silliness and sweetness. My 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 my art is to study this expansion, to record the disrupted bodies, objects, and places in time’s wake.
