Ai Kijima

Ai Kijima’s pop art-inspired works feature cartoon characters collaged into layered quilts, which appear as both safety blankets and menacing meditations on global culture. Born in Japan and based in New York, Kijima begins each piece by searching through her extensive trove of textile scraps cut from bed sheets or curtains designed for children. Kijima sews the fabric pieces into kaleidoscopic quilts brimming with energy and visual information. The collaged images fail to cohere into any linear narrative but create a snapshot of juvenilia from different parts of the world. Her arrangements draw out existing threads in the images, exaggerating the codes of gender, nationality, and violence laced into the cartoons by their corporate authors.