The following text is taken from the catalog for Wide Open at the McCaig-Welles Gallery. Written by Nick Kuszyk.
“Kai is almost seven feet tall. Kai makes things that are half tree house, half science project, half skate ramp, half formalist destruction. The piece in the show comes from a conversation we had about earthquakes being the reason religion exists. Huh? Kai blew my mind off by talking about the first time faith came before royalty. We talked about Indian monks tricking kings into drinking their piss on mountaintops to make them hallucinate so they would see a higher power during the bronze age. Wha?! We also talked about how Andy Kessler is like the metaphorical high priest of NYC skateboarding and how skateparks are like religious temples. All of those things combined led us to make the weird “bowl” shaped piece being crushed by curvy clamps. Duh. We talked about how crazy Mormonism is. Kai was one of the first people I met for the show and our conversation quickly made me aware of how random artists’ logics are. Everyone comes up with the strangest solutions to communicate the strangest ideas but in most cases it makes sense once you dig in. This is why I wanted to collaborate with everyone initially. I wanted to work with different ways of thinking, different influences, different sets of standards”