AMERICAN GURL

Hi! I'm Kish Robinson — a multidisciplinary artist, director, and performer working in music, film, and the written word. My most extensive project is KILO KISH, a solo music project spanning ten years of exploring internal and external identities and socio-cultural expectations. 
 AMERICAN GURL is the title track of my next album coming out this March. This album explores the power of choice, finding personal freedoms, and escaping imposed old notions and identities. I made this with my collaborator Ray Brady, on multiple writing trips to Joshua Tree, CA, between 2019-2020.  
 This song speaks to the rat race and static systems that keep us in a rut. I'm always trying to overcome my own history, explore black history's weight, and overcome the need to be a success story, an achiever, and a good example. I've been wondering how to redefine freedom and success. I've been boxed in throughout my career by race, womanhood, age, and experience level, which has made my practice sometimes feel like running headfirst at a brick wall. But I always imagine a place where artists can feel singular and free. I made this work to detoxify myself from what others expected of me.  I created the cover collage from my collection of vintage postcards, which I repurposed along with my image. These postcards represent memories and moments of others, some even written out to loved ones. Now, they're thrust into the present and meshed with my experience decades later. The image is one of many iterations in this style and a part of my American Gurl Series — A collection of digital artworks and films.  Americanism is a hazy myth, a web of so many different backgrounds, archetypes, and iconography that I can try on for size through my music and art. Working digitally, film images from the past connects and tethers our American experience summing up my understanding of it as a whole. Exploring these concepts as NFTs and in the web3 space brings them even further into the future.  I’m excited to share! I hope you enjoy the song and images!