Naiya Satya McClay(they/them) is a Philadelphia based painter, illustrator, and multimedia artist. Following their BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, they center their work around conversations between texture and  materiality, the burden of presumptive femininity, and the self as memory and mask, depicted through the guise of cartoon realism. 

Using highly saturated paints, mixed media, and exaggerated figures, they create narrative images that serve as indulgent, critical, smudge-covered mirrors; fogging over the line between the formative youthful wonder and the passively aberrant adult. Bodies, textures, and suggestive expressions become heirlooms of nostalgic personhood.  The work bears a tender and forgiving lens, and the nuances of queer identity are parsed through with a voyeur’s eye. Playing with self-portraiture, their figures portray a“pseudo-self", masquerading through ambient landscapes, as boardwalk caricatures to be seen, consumed, spat out, and held close. 

Brightly contrasting colors, icons signaling the extremes of masculine and feminine sentimentality, the safety and discomfort of being one person our whole lives, each provide the stage for reality and subjectivity to hold hands.  Circling personal themes of consumable identity, trans bodies under fetishized scrutiny, subjective femininity, and satirized self respect,  Naiya is creating work about love, loss and whatever lurks between.