Kayla Lockwood (b. Orange County, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Working across painting, installation, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, film, and digital media, her practice examines the relationships between everyday environments, visual perception, and the social, cultural, and economic systems that shape experiences of place and belonging. Drawing from familiar objects, architectural surfaces, commercial imagery, natural forms, and historical research, she explores how systems of classification, recognition, and representation influence the ways we perceive and understand our surroundings.

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Central to her practice is an investigation of the tension between idealized notions of home and the social realities they often conceal, including histories of labor, inequality, displacement, violence, and care. Incorporating domestic artifacts, family archives, and elements of the built environment, she examines how familiar spaces and objects reflect broader social structures. Through processes of repetition, accumulation, distressing, distortion, and reconstruction, Lockwood transforms recognizable materials and imagery to challenge their familiar meanings. Her work explores the contradictions between ideals of stability, independence, and opportunity and the structures that shape access to them.

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Lockwood has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions including Stories in Blue at Thrd Space Studio (San Antonio, TX), Emerging Perspectives at Delaplaine Arts Center (Frederick, MD), In an Instant at Union Street Gallery (Chicago Heights, IL), and Public Realities – Urban Fictions at Erlebniszentrum CAP Kiel (Kiel, Germany). She has also participated in The Honeycomb Project, a traveling exhibition curated by Candace Garlock and presented throughout Nevada, California, and Idaho. In 2025, she performed in That Show About the Hot Dog at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as part of CFACoLab.

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She earned a BFA in Art & Technology from the University of Oregon (UO) and an MFA in Art from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), where she currently serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Graphic Design & Media Program. Alongside her teaching and studio practice, she founded the Little Object Library, a community-based art and object exchange inspired by the Little Free Library model, and co-founded CUT / CUTS, a Las Vegas-based artist-run collective. She is also a participating member of Augury House in Portland, Oregon.