NIGHTS DRAGOONS, Kat Solares, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 22 in. / 76.2 x 55.88 cm.

Through Fire, Pattern, and Spirit: The Symbolic World of Kat Solares

May 27, 2025 Gavin Coates

Featured image: NIGHTS DRAGOONS, Kat Solares, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 22 in. / 76.2 x 55.88 cm.

Kat Solares’ work doesn’t ask for attention, it seizes it, envelops it in flame, memory, and myth.

Kat Solares blends Indigenous symbolism, psychedelic color, and activist storytelling into visionary paintings that reclaim narrative and resist erasure.

A painter who crafts with cultural resonance and ancestral urgency, Solares transforms the canvas into a battleground of symbols, stories, and emotional defiance. Her latest works unveil a vivid, coded cosmology that challenges perception and insists on remembrance.

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Creature, Kat Solares, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 22 in. / 76.2 x 55.88 cm.

In Creature, a coyote-like figure gazes beyond the frame, its fur meticulously crosshatched against a sky of psychedelic hues. Behind it, concentric tribal-etched orbs scatter across the sky like cosmic pollen. Dragonflies hover over a surreal desert-lake world, hinting at a realm where myth and memory fuse. The juxtaposition of hyper-stylized mark-making and spiritual geometry evokes a dreamstate, where identity is fluid and the landscape itself breathes with hidden meanings.

Koto's Vision the Eleventh Summer's Gift, Kat Solares,, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 25 in. / 76.2 x 63.5 cm.

This painting radiates with esoteric energy. The color palette blazes, reds, oranges, and golds sear the canvas like a midsummer solstice. Koto, depicted mid-air, is framed by an aura of decision: her hands outstretched, one bearing a fruit, the other possibly empty or containing a hidden weight. The figure kneeling below observes with reverence, or skepticism. Glyphs embedded in the scene, zigzags, bees, radiant lines, heighten the ceremonial atmosphere. This piece operates like a visual myth: part riddle, part revelation.

Silence is a Cage Made of Ash; Bricks to Embers, Hands.., Kat Solares, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 25 in. / 76.2 x 63.5 cm.

In one of Solares’ most charged works, a figure stares through prison bars that blur into painted red handprints, an unmistakable nod to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis. Her hair flames upward, a burning crown of resistance. Around her, sacred symbols, triangles, circles, beadwork, echo the Medicine Wheel, standing defiantly against a backdrop of colonial red brick. It’s a cry for justice, a refusal to disappear, and a demand to see and be seen.

Kat Solares fuses personal mythos, Indigenous visual language, and unflinching social critique into a singular artistic vision. Her art is part visionary dream-journal, part protest banner. Across these three works, themes of spiritual agency, identity under duress, and ancestral presence emerge not as passive observation, but as rallying cries encoded in pigment. Solares reminds us: the future is ancestral, and the spirit, once seen, cannot be caged.

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