KIANA THAYERa designer thinking about quoting, collage, camouflage, and the endless cycle of sense making. thanks for coming, happy to have you!
instagramkianathayer.studio(@)gmail.comcurrently: 2D MFA candidate at Cranbrook Academy of Art


nesting beyond the glow

Moths encased in light, spiders nesting beyond the glow. The spider wears wings and speaks in soft tones. As you draw closer and settle into the light, the spider reveals himself—feeding off you until you’re able to pull yourself free from the light, the lie, the dream. And as you dry your wings, you begin to find comfort in the truth.




STICK
(thank god i’m not pregnant with the devil’s baby.)

How do you wrap your head around loving someone who never existed? How could you stay with someone who never cared to know you? How did you let a liar sit across from you over and over? How did you watch them spit on your wins and still stay loyal? How did you sleep next to someone who used intimacy as a reward? Why did you keep going when they erase you the second someone else walks in the room? How does it feel knowing they were building a secret life behind your back while calling you whenever they were in crisis? How could you believe the gifts meant anything when they were hiding the truth? How is it that you talked about having children and they didn’t mention she was four months pregnant? How did you not see they were stealing from you the whole time? How did you love someone who watched you cry with satisfaction? How have you not burnt the whole memory of them to the ground? Why have you not drove 13 hours to put a brick through their windshield and spider eggs in their truck? How will you ever be able to love again after loving the devil? And why in the world would they name their baby Stick? That’s so embarrassing. 



they’re coming for you

nightlight for an evil motherfucker before and after an impulsive coat of paint.




reaching between
earth and sky

In Theosophical studies there is a theory that thought-forms have weight. That a thought, intense enough, can leave a mark—not just in the mind but in the world. These forms exist in a liminal space, somewhere between energy and materiality, shaping reality as much as being shaped by it.

Hard not to think of this now, in the post-digital era, when images no longer just depict reality but intervene in it, fold into it, dissolve it. A face that never existed. A body that moves but was never filmed. A landscape no one has ever stepped foot on. The closer we try to depict the world, the more slippery it gets.

What does it mean to get back to the real? Baudrillard warned of the hyper-real, the copy with no original, the simulation that replaces the thing it was meant to reflect. But maybe the shift is even stranger than that—maybe images now are like thought-forms, their own kind of energetic entities, pulsing with intent, untethered from an origin. Deep-fakes, generated personas, algorithmic hallucinations—they don’t just blur reality, they generate it. And we take them in, knowingly, unknowingly, until they settle into our perception, shaping our sense of the world.

Design thrives on this ambiguity. It trades in semiotics, in the construction of meaning through image and text, grid and interface. It smooths the surface, refines the message. But if thought precedes form, if the idea shapes the real, then design is also the work of conjuring worlds. Branding, storytelling, political myth-making—who gets to say what’s real, and for whom? A perfectly optimized ad, a carefully controlled feed, a deep-fake—each is a construct, a thought-form made visible. Theosophy suggests these forms exist in a realm beyond ordinary sight, that they are always at work, shaping what we take to be true. Maybe digital images, infinitely replicable, endlessly mutable, are the same—an invisible architecture behind what we think of as real.



woohoo

Praying for a new car, if i make an image of it will it materialize into existence?


weather report

The world and I are not distinct from each other, but part of the same continuous flow. It’s not about creating something perfect or final. It’s about making space for complexity, for contradiction, for multiple truths to coexist. It is not about offering one clear narrative but inviting you to see yourself in these fragments, these layers, these colors. It’s an invitation to enter a space where everything is always in motion, always transforming, always in relation.






Look & Learn

HEY KIDDOS! If you ever find a man on top of you, here’s what to do: 2, 3, 4—whether it’s a hoof or a table lamp—5 is when you have the honor of smashing his face in!




where are you? 
i can’t find you.

on loss and longing & learning the CNC


Photos by Daniel Ribar & Kiana Thayer