Cayla Birk.

(American, born 1990)

Cayla Birk. is an American contemporary artist known for her use of codes and iconography in her mixed media installations. She rearranges familiar visual signs and everyday objects, juxtaposing them against each other in conceptually layered works, and then provides clues to help viewers decode her content and understand her interpretation. “I would like to think that my art, and its codes, in some way brings people outside of what they normally think and opens them up to something that they’ve never experienced before,” she said about her work. Birk was born in 1990 in Florida. Her upbringing exposed her to a variety of cultural and world experiences, which, along with her background in branding and as a former apprentice to artist Yaari, have influenced her work today. She has stated that a lot of her inspiration comes from writers, musicians, and epistemologists such as Jack Kerouac, Ella Fitzgerald, Chuck Palahniuk, and several others. Her mixed media works use traditional acrylic techniques with other unique materials, creating designs that are at once both recognizable and mysterious. Though the materials used in each project are varied, there is usually a recurring theme and subject matter linking the works together, such as an homage to a historical event, or social commentary about branding. Her interest in using hidden codes in her work came from her series of works known as “Birktones,” which was inspired by the use of coded numbers to identify Pantone colors, a concept she came across when she started her career in advertising. Her subsequent series of works such as “The Periodic Table of Relevance” and “Scriptures” have thus integrated their own sets of codes within her mixed media pieces. Birk’s work has been featured in galleries such as Gallery 212 in Miami and Contessa Gallery in Ohio. She currently lives and works in Palm Beach, Florida.