Kat Tagorda

Artist Statement

Kat Tagorda is a multidisciplinary artist based in Burbank, California. She received her BA and MFA from California State University, Northridge, where she was awarded the Arts Council Scholarship and Second Place in the CSUN Student Juried Art Show. Her work has been shown at the Palos Verdes Art Center, the CSUN Main Gallery, and Avenue 50 Studios. She has also worked as an exhibition installer, studio manager for the CSUN Graduate Studios, and artist assistant for Kalli Arte Collective.

Tagorda's practice is rooted in memory, domestic space, and the instability of what we call home. She draws from personal photographs and the apartments she has lived in across Southern California, using painting, printmaking, and sculpture to reconstruct and alter these interiors. The work is not documentary. She distorts, erases, and reconfigures familiar objects and fixtures to reflect how recollection shifts over time. Her installations function as modular rooms built from fragments: heaters, tiles, fans, borrowed furniture, and materials pulled from lived spaces are turned into portraits of place and habit.

By focusing on the ordinary architecture of rented life, Tagorda examines how people build stability inside spaces that are never permanent. Her work treats everyday objects as carriers of both private and collective experience, showing how the home can be a site of longing, revision, and return. Across mediums, she uses distortion as a way to admit imperfection, to mark where memory departs from fact, and to show how rooms hold what we cannot name directly.