Opening Reception: While You Were Sleeping | Karla Diaz

Please join us for an Artist's reception for “While You Were Sleeping,” an exhibition of surreal watercolor paintings by Karla Diaz. Like her ongoing body of work, Insomnia, these paintings emerge in the middle of the night in the hybrid space between sleep and wakefulness. Long before her 2017 stroke, artist Karla Diaz dreamed vividly, and would wake in the morning to recount to her partner each scene witnessed in the night. But while recovering, Diaz spent hour after hour awake with insomnia, healing and making paintings. Creating the works in this exhibition with a memory transformed by injury, Diaz describes a process of unlearning her formal training and instead trusting herself to make the work she needed to make, a powerful act of advocacy—for one’s voice and one’s very survival.