A stepped silhouette of red brick disrupts a stained expanse of concrete wall – a ghostly trace of a stairway charred beyond repair. Vestigial archives the residue of this trauma with a field of gestural black marks, recording the physical evidence of failure through a life-size rubbing of the stairwell. In mapping this texture onto a nearby room, Vestigial highlights the uncanny effects of architectural accretion, where the awkward dimensions of a long narrow room echo those of a stairway to nowhere. Meditating on memory, displacement, and obsolescence, Vestigial salvages forgotten peripheries and palimpsests, speaking to the scars and voids left by things past.

Working in installation, painting, photography, and video, artist Flora Kao explores the poetics of human relationship with environment. Examining architecture and technology, Kao transforms everyday structures into systems of beauty. 

In Los Angeles, Kao has exhibited solo at Gallery 825, Art-merge LAB, HAUS Gallery, the LA Art Show, and the UC Irvine University Art Gallery. Kao’s work has also been featured at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, Emily Harvey Foundation in New York, Infernoesque in Berlin, and at various Southern California venues including Torrance Art Museum, National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, Culver Center for the Arts, LAXART, See Line Gallery, Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Beacon Arts Building, West LA College, California State University Long Beach, and La Sierra University. Kao holds a MFA from UC Irvine in Studio Art, a BFA in Painting from Otis College of Art and Design, and a BA in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College. Kao’s work can be viewed online at http://floratkao.blogspot.com