Khaila Batts’ work is influenced by the fluidity of memories, she blends digital collage, acetate, and painted surfaces. She creates surrealistic and chaos scenes through color manipulation. She explores how perception pieces together incomplete and altered images. Color and emotion inform her artistic practice; together, they enable her paintings to examine the relational nature of color. Using tiny organic brushstrokes and cool shades of blue, she recontextualizes violence scenes as calming and comforting as ocean waves. Batts’s large-scale paintings are ambiguous representation of her conflicting feelings, struggles and relationships between her and her surroundings; created as a reflection of mundane, everyday life. Her interrogation of these relationships during Covid has birthed a duality, that presents the holistic experience, engulfed in both the cruelty and kindness that we all experience. Batts often draws inspiration from familiarity; she often incorporates photographs of family and her neighbor into her work, serving as vessels for connection and a recollection of the past.