MacKenzie Giles

2025 Linda A. Day Endowed Student Award Recipient

Mackenzie Giles was born in Ventura, California and raised in rural Southern California within a religious community during the early 2000s. She earned a B.A. in Sculpture from Brigham Young University–Idaho in 2019 and is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Drawing and Painting at CSU Long Beach. In addition to her studio practice, she has a professional background in art restoration and display design. Her work has been exhibited in Insights at the Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, the Made in California Juried Exhibition at the Brea Gallery, the Awagami International Miniature Print Exhibition in Tokushima, Japan, and Authentic Marksin Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Artist Statement

My work inhabits the in-between—a space where distortion collides with memory and sweetness meets unease. Through layered, abstract compositions, I explore how emotional weight is encoded into form, color, and structure. While my practice is rooted in personal history, I am drawn to spaces where the familiar is tinged with contradiction, ultimately creating dreamlike environments threaded with anxiety.

My paintings emerge through a process that combines precise systems with spontaneous interventions. Measured frameworks are disrupted by disjointed symmetry, cropped forms, and intentional voids—visual decisions that invite friction, tension, and ambiguity. Color functions as both structure and narrative, shifting between muted pastels, atmospheric blues, and sharp bursts of saturation, mapping a psychological terrain that is both intimate and unstable.