Pakayla Biehn’s most recent body of work concerns her congenital vision disability, called Strabismus. Her eyesight consists of mutually exclusive images trying, unsuccessfully, to bond into a cohesive impression. She uses her own embodied identity as a starting point for her paintings and installations. Her goal is to find a visual language to negotiate the intersection of imagery and create a similar perspective to give the viewer an understanding of her own optical condition.
"If it is possible to "paint a dream" then Pakayla has done it. Her combination of realism and abstraction blending together to create some kind of "romantic surrealism" is both entrancing and disturbing at the same time..and I love it. Clearly tapped into a "feminine mystique," Pakayla's paintings are narrative in their depiction of beauty and choice. Pakayla uses her talents as a painter and in fact, becomes a "psychological journalist"... her subjects seem to be caught in an "ethereal fork in the road." "Do I go one way or the other...and what will the consequences be?" These are choices we need to, have to and get to make every day and not just in terms of physical directions and decisions, but emotional ones as well."