How Artist Alake Shilling Gives Kitsch a Conscience

Wilshire Boulevard—one of Los Angeles’ most storied and congested streets—yields glimpses of landmarks, billboards and an assortment of Angeleno ephemera, yet none are as faithful to the experience of L.A. driving as the 25-foot-high anthropomorphic bear that has been marooned at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Glendon Avenue since October. Suspended in motion, the bubble-eyed bear hurtles forward in a dilapidated car, the tearful faces of daisies lining his path. The whimsically sardonic inflatable sculpture quartered just outside Westwood’s Hammer Museum, Buggy Bear Crashes Made in L.A. is the creation of Los Angeles-based artist Alake Shilling, who—despite her fascination with L.A.’s car culture—does not drive.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Shilling became attuned to the dissonant rhythms and modalities of her hometown—the abject anachronisms, the standardized vanity, the blurry distinction between imagined realities and lived ones. Baptized in the visual legacy of Hollywood, Shilling’s animistic characters—rendered through vivid paints and ceramic sculpture—teem with the wayward sentiment that slips through the cracks of pop culture. In this way, these mawkish woodland creatures are mascots of a new pop culture, conceived by Shilling’s own design. Cuddly, uncanny and wryly melancholic, Shilling’s world of sunshine and rainbows is not always one of smiles and sweet endings.

“I think my art is a reflection of everything I experience in the real world,” Shilling told Observer. “It’s like I’m making my own alphabet and… the whole art piece is the sentence.” In this way, Shilling conjugates caricatures of kitsch—moon-eyed ladybugs, purple-furred panda bears, baby-blue bunnies—into totems of human emotion and conflict. Her characters evince depths of emotion and vulnerability that very few people are able to express in their everyday lives. Shilling’s candy-colored garden snakes and speckled-shelled turtles do not conform to any degree of respectability or regulation; they exist in a wonderland of relentless sentiment. Shilling, who confessed that at one point her biggest dream was to become a hermit, said she often struggles to find clarity in a city so caulked with rituals of attention. In many ways, her artistic practice is a coping mechanism.

“I feel like when I speak, people don’t listen, but in my art, I have a voice,” Shilling said. “It’s my world. My characters trust me. They believe in me. They have a conversation with who they are.”

Shilling’s artistry is, to some degree, a practice in magical thinking. Working from the floor of her cozy living-room studio, Shilling mixes unconventional materials—Styrofoam beads, glitter, cotton balls—into her paintings; she leaves her ceramic sculptures pitted with uneven ridges and scored by carving instruments, evidence of her creative provenance. Shilling’s preference for texture and tactility gives her work a certain vitality. Her ceramic sculptures are particularly spirited, appearing as though they have lived—many of them perch talismanically on sculpted landscapes. A pale ladybug and a purple panda sit on a grassy knoll; a blue bunny and a brown bear rest on a mountainous ridge. They present as contemporary parables, slightly discolored by wear and age, bearing titles such as I had a long day please bring me a snack (2025) and Fashion Is a Lifestyle Said the Purple Panda in Pucci (2025). Shilling explained that her characters are portals of empathy, simple and unmuddled by sociopolitical structures or interpretative metaphors; they are affable and candid.

Shilling’s work—visually informed by pop culture, cartoons and middle-American kitsch—is in dialogue with the act of interpretation as it exists in the contemporary art world. Like kitsch, the artist relies on audience familiarity and immediate emotional comprehension. Yet Shilling’s work goes beyond the cheap thrills of kitsch by facilitating a sort of psychological transference between the audience and her morose, cartoonish ceramic sculptures.

“I’m still trying to understand why I’m so drawn to animated characters,” Shilling admitted. “I can sympathize and empathize with what they’re going through. It becomes less about me and more about what the actual overarching piece is like. I can separate myself from the issue and see all the moving parts, but I can only do that if it’s cute. The cuteness is what gives me the empathy I need.”

The artist’s practice purposely defies clarity, oscillating seamlessly through the spheres of high and low art. This quality, like much of Shilling’s work, is typified by equal parts reverence toward and friction with pop culture. Shilling playfully referred to Buggy Bear—a recurring character throughout her work and her artistic avatar—as her Mickey Mouse. “He’s my trinket!” Shilling proclaimed.

To a certain degree, Shilling renders all of her characters with episodic intimacy. They embark on new adventures and experience new emotions in each appearance as though they are protagonists in a Saturday morning cartoon. When admitted to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the artist had ambitions of going into children’s animation, yet became quickly disenchanted upon learning of the strict rules and restrictions on character design and the intense competition within the industry. Taking inspiration from the grotesque and irreverent artwork of the Chicago Imagists as well as the various quaint, winsome forms of Afrodiasporic folk art, Shilling made the transition into fine art. She had the freedom to not only design as she pleased but to execute emotions and expressions that could have been diluted by animation censors.

Central to Shilling’s practice is the tender yet indelible belief that complexity can be etched into nostalgic analogs. “It’s like I am writing a really serious, emotional diary entry in Comic Sans,” Shilling joked. “The font is silly, but what I’m saying is real and genuine. And it comes from my heart.”