Born March 2, 1973, in Springfield Missouri and growing up in neighboring Kansas, Kris Kuksi spent his youth in rural seclusion and isolation along with a blue-collar, working mother, two significantly older brothers, and an absent father. Open country, sparse trees, and alcoholic stepfather, all paving the way for an individual saturated in imagination and introversion. His propensity for the unusual has been a constant since childhood, a lifelong fascination that lent itself to his macabre art later in life. The grotesque to him, as it seemed, was beautiful. Kris Kuksi garners recognition and acclaim for the intricate sculptures that result from his unique and meticulous technique. A process that requires countless hours to assemble, collect, manipulate, cut, and re-shape thousands of individual parts, finally uniting them into an orchestral-like seamless cohesion that defines the historical rise and fall of civilization and envisions the possible future(s) of humanity. Each sculpture embodies the trademarks of his philosophy and practice, while serving as a testament to the multifaceted nature of perception – From timeless iconic references of Gods and Goddess, to challenging ideas of organized religion and morality, to the struggle to understand, and bend, the limits of mortality. None is complete without a final and brilliant touch of satire and rebuke all conceived in the aesthetic essence of the Baroque fused with the modern day industrial world.
“I get inspired by the industrial world, all the rigidity of machinery, the network of pipes, wires, refineries, etc. Then I join that with an opposite of flowing graceful, harmonious, and pleasing design of the Baroque and Rococo. And of course I add a bit weirdness and the macabre. It’s all about how I see the evolution of what man makes his created environment look like. I had such a major emphasis in painting and drawing earlier in my career, and had a great time with it but I always felt something was missing. I knew deep inside I was a builder, and so my 3-d work is the expansion into that realm. I still enjoy painting and doing figurative work, but those moments are reserved for special times. Yet sculptural works are wonderfully intricate constructions of pop culture effluvia like plastic model kits, injection molded toys, dolls, plastic skulls, knick-knack figurines, miniature fencing, toy animals, mechanical parts and ornate frames or furniture parts; assembled into grotesque tableaux that look a bit like an explosion in Hieronymus Bosch’s attic. My art speaks of a timelessness; potentiality and motion attempting to reach on forever, and yet pessimistically delayed; forced into the stillness of death and eternal sleep. I treat morbidity with a sympathetic touch and symbolize the paradox of the death of the individual by objective personification of death. There is a fear of this consciousness because it drops in upon us without mercy, and yet there is a need to appeal to it in order to provide a sense of security, however deluded that sense may be. My art warns us that this appeal is irrelevant, and that we should be slow to create a need for it. The themes I use also teach us that although death may pursue us arbitrarily, we should never neglect to mourn the tremendous loss of individual potential. In personal reflection, I feel that in the world today much of mankind is oftentimes a frivolous and fragile being driven primarily by greed and materialism. I hope that my art exposes the fallacies of Man, unveiling a new level of awareness to the viewer.”
“Perhaps it is far too objectionable to begin to agree upon what art is or what great art should be. Therefore, it is most certain that for myself, within this occupation, I must be true to my tastes and to expel those pressures to conform to art-trends new or old.”