About Me

You probably already figured this out by now, but I am an artist! My name is Kaelin Beckner and I’m currently studying at the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) to earn a BFA in Fine Arts with a Game Art Certificate. I am also a singer, but if you asked me to sing alone I’d freeze on the spot, too shy. To hear me sing alone seriously is rare, so consider the experience a bonus achievement. Growing up, I was fully immersed in both visual art, and music. I attended the School for Creative and Performing Arts and performed with the Cincinnati Youth Choir for several years. What drew me most to choir was the sense of community, and working as a group. Now I am active Vice President and Co-founder of the UC Community of Art Students. As an organization we support creatives through art making at the collegiate level, regularly hosting meetings and art-related events. My involvement in all these things has provided me with many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, of which I’m forever grateful. My travels have inspired me and my studies, forming a broader outlook and knowledge that I can pull from. Being in a family of folks who travel/traveled often, their appreciation, zestful outlook, and worldly knowledge was passed on to me. I imbue this energy into my practice. I hope my energy is contagious. So much talk for energy and activity, I actually cherish being bored. When was the last time you were genuinely bored? It’s a rarity as we age. It makes way for freedom and creativity. Let yourself become bored.

My work explores ideas of hybridity in many facets, which manifests as subjects like monsters, mutants, as situations of dual nature. I explore the relations or dynamic of things: absurdity and mundanity, technology and the natural world, material and immaterial, humans and beyond. I enjoy working across physical and digital mediums, taking advantage of their form. Gestural line work and manipulation with the grid in the form of pixels and text becomes a process of finding ways to push past their limitations. Animation is the space I feel most inspired to work in, other work often informing my approach. Vitality of motion and expression, and time in animation feeds into dynamic composition. Though I communicate with characters that would typically be considered undesirable, they are depicted with an openness, empathy, a level of respect that they too have interesting or desirable qualities. A liveliness flows through the dialogue of how these characters interact in their environments.