Collection: Snake Snake Snake Butterfly

In Snake Snake Snake Butterfly, Kaia Burg’s wildly energetic drawings transport the viewer into a world defined by expressive marks and charged colors. In her work, Burg distills personal experiences and interests into simplified shapes, arranging them in dramatic compositions that stretch to the edges of the image plane. A number of recent drawings depict butterfly people (figures with big, colorful wings) and heart people (with roughly heart-shaped bodies or heads), grinning amidst houses, waterfalls, spaceships, and animals. 

Burg uses both memory and fantastical invention to develop each composition, saying, “It’s in my head.” In translating these images from life or imagination to paper, she develops her own visual language. Oblong shapes represent trees; triangles stand in for mountains; loosely symmetrical patches of color represent butterfly wings. Occasionally, she makes lists to plot future subjects: “spiders, fingernails, ice cream, liver.” 

In many works, Burg’s distinctive handwriting plays a role: some drawings are diaristic, incorporating text like “my drawing for today” in graphite. Others, like the show’s namesake, incorporate words that are at first didactic, labeling each of the spirited figures and objects throughout, and then rhythmic, leading the eye across the page: Snake, snake, snake, butterfly. 

Each drawing is a kind of playful aesthetic research that is bold, vibrant, and abundant. Burg is a brilliant colorist, pairing shades of periwinkle with poppy, citrine with evergreen. Dozens of small color studies illustrate a rigorous commitment to palette, mark making, and the release of energy. She presses pigment to paper with force, her marks vigorous and deliberate.

At times it can feel like Burg’s drawings are bursting at the seams: the sun, the snails, and the grass are all too marvelous for the paper on which they live. And this might be part of the genius of her work: created between 2021-2025 amidst turbulent times, an uncontainable, expansive landscape awaits.