PLACE/MAKING was a group exhibition by three recent University of Kansas MFA graduates, Tiana Nanayo Ku’uleialoha Honda, SK Reed, and Kirsten Taylor, whose exhibition explores how the artists find themselves at home. 

Each artist searches for deeper connections to place in an effort to feel more at home in a world in flux. Honda, Reed, and Taylor, three friends who met and made work while in Kansas, each consider place in relationship to their unique backgrounds.

Together, the artists of Place/Making speak to the realities of finding a home in the twenty-first century.

Tiana Nanayo Kuuleialoha Honda (she/hers/hers) 

Tiana Nanayo Kuuleialoha Honda is a printmaker whose current work explores themes of  displacement and the reinforcement of lost cultural ties to her homeland of Hawai’i. The work  she produces is part of an ongoing journey to reacquaint herself with her multicultural  background and utilizes aspects of the land, the various cultures, and the histories present within  Hawai’i to foster a stronger connection and understanding to her home. 

SK Reed (they/them/theirs) 

SK Reed’s recent work explores the strangeness associated with being a queer body. The  difference between the liberation felt within oneself and the ways they feel their body is being  perceived by others. A new character named “Creature” engages with the more-than-human  world as a guide and teacher to counter ways of being. 

Kirsten Taylor (she/her/hers) 

Kirsten Taylor is a multimedia artist based in the tallgrass prairie ecoregion. Her work  investigates relationships between humans and nature and questions the traditionally Western  distinction between humans and the natural world. Taylor does this by examining the ways in  which our lives intersect with plants and animals and encouraging this investigation in the  viewer.

“It's not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human.”