Kerrigan Reyes

Kerrigan Reyes approaches art as a language capable of translating the difficult, ordinary, and often contradictory aspects of human experience. Working across photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, and digital art, he returns consistently to subjects including mental health, addiction, abuse, mortality, memory, and fear of the unknown. The medium may change, but the central concern remains: how can an artwork help one person recognize the experience of another?

Reyes grew up in a household that treated art as a valuable skill. His parents encouraged him to attend art school from an early age, beginning a creative education that would later expand across several disciplines. Although his formal degree remains in progress, he considers both academic study and independent learning essential to his development. Art school introduced him not only to techniques and professional practices, but also to the importance of connecting with other people.

“I have learned how to be a jack-of-all-trades,” Reyes says. His education has included sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, digital art, proposal writing, publishing, and the practical work of building an artistic career. Just as important, however, has been the knowledge he has developed on his own. For Reyes, artistic growth does not occur exclusively within institutions. It continues through experimentation, observation, and the gradual discovery of what a practice needs to become.

This openness is reflected in the range of styles he explores. Reyes is interested in how the same subject can be communicated differently through abstraction, realism, photorealism, or Impressionism. He compares these visual approaches to languages that express a shared idea through different structures. The wording changes, but the underlying meaning remains recognizable.

Across these shifts in form, Reyes repeatedly returns to the more difficult dimensions of lived experience. Mental health, addiction, abuse, suicide, death, and family appear throughout his work, alongside more elusive concerns such as memory, anticipation, and uncertainty. He is particularly influenced by photographer Andres Serrano, whose confrontational images address subjects ranging from religion and sexuality to mortality. What Reyes values in Serrano’s work is not provocation for its own sake, but its ability to make viewers examine the source of their reactions.

That process of examination is central to Reyes’s own ambitions. He wants his work to bring attention to experiences that are frequently misunderstood, concealed, or treated as uncomfortable. Success is therefore not determined simply by the size of an audience. “If an art piece is connected to many people versus one, did it change that one person’s life, or did the group of people walk away with barely any thought?” he asks. Given that choice, he would focus on the individual whose encounter with the work carried lasting meaning.

Reyes finds material throughout his daily life, including in experiences that might initially appear too mundane to become art. Brushing his teeth, eating, doing laundry, or listening to the activity outside his home can become points of departure. He is interested in what happens when an ordinary action is taken away, disrupted, or made unsafe. By altering the conditions surrounding a familiar experience, he exposes how much emotional and psychological meaning everyday routines can carry.

The natural world provides another model for thinking about behavior. Reyes describes observing the ocean and recognizing different responses to its scale and movement. Some people remain on the shore, others enter cautiously with assistance, and some move directly into the water. For him, these choices parallel the ways people confront life: “We are too scared, we need help, or we go all in.”

His studio routine is structured around creating the conditions for sustained attention. Reyes prepares his paints, adjusts the easel until its position feels right, selects his brushes, arranges water, and chooses music suited to the work. He tries to anticipate what he will need so that he can remain immersed once painting begins. This practical preparation gives intuition room to operate.

When a creative block emerges, Reyes returns to familiar subjects and methods. He believes that drawing what one already knows can relieve the pressure to invent something immediately. Repetition quiets the mind, allowing experimentation to develop without being forced. “If you do not reach a creative block, then you are not trying hard enough,” he says. For Reyes, uncertainty is not evidence of failure. It is part of the process through which a practice moves beyond its established limits.

The emotional urgency of his work is grounded in personal experience. At sixteen, Reyes was hospitalized for his mental health. During a conversation about treatment, a psychiatrist told his parents that he would likely spend the rest of his life moving in and out of hospitals. The prognosis profoundly altered his sense of what his future could contain. For several years, he stopped believing that meaningful change was possible.

A later relationship helped challenge that conclusion. Through another person’s sustained support, Reyes began to recognize qualities in himself that had become difficult to see, including perseverance, resilience, hope, and the capacity to affect other people through art. He describes this period not as an immediate recovery, but as a gradual return to possibility. It shaped his commitment to making work that helps others feel less isolated within their own experiences.

That commitment also informs the direction of his photography. Reyes plans to move increasingly beyond staged studio shoots and photograph people and places within everyday environments. Working in what he calls “real life” will allow him to engage more directly with the unscripted situations that already inspire much of his practice.

He is also developing a solo exhibition addressing nuclear war, political tension, and the persistence of ordinary life beneath these threats. The project considers how people continue their daily routines while large-scale dangers remain present in the background. Through it, Reyes hopes to initiate conversations about collective responsibility and the conditions necessary for people to feel safer, more secure, and less exposed to harm.

For Reyes, art remains closely integrated with life. He admits that balance can be difficult because art occupies much of his waking and imaginative attention. When that intensity becomes overwhelming, he grounds himself in a particular place. He might stand on a busy street or sit in his backyard, breathe slowly, and notice where his attention moves. Traffic, birds, children, or distant environmental sounds return him to direct observation.

His advice to emerging artists follows the same principle of attentiveness. He encourages them to pursue what they love, even when that interest changes from one moment to the next, and to accept that ability develops through sustained effort. No artist begins with complete command of a medium.

Reyes’s practice is ultimately concerned with reaching people rather than resolving the subjects it examines. His work does not claim that every person experiences pain, fear, or recovery in the same way. Instead, it searches for points of recognition within those differences. Through the difficult and ordinary details of human life, he creates opportunities for viewers to feel acknowledged and, perhaps, less alone.