VHS Girl: Be Kind, Rewind

VHS GIRL started painting her own renditions of video box art in acrylic on wood blocks because she wanted affordable art of her favorite movies. She’s since amassed a large and loyal following on instagram, and exhibited at Art Basel Miami and the LA Art Fair as well as galleries in Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and elsewhere.

Based out of Illinois, artist Kathryn Winchester aka VHS Girl has a unique specialty: recreating iconic VHS covers on blocks of wood in the same size as the classic videotapes she collects. These hand-painted works evoke a uniquely playful sense of nostalgia via an outsider lens. Educated but self-taught, she initially joined the online videotape collecting community to buy, sell and trade rare videotapes and meet fellow collectors that shared her love for the low-fi VHS format. Back in 2015 the videotape collecting underground was anything but mainstream, and Katie started painting her own versions of her favorite tape covers as an affordable means of decorating her home. After posting images of her work online, offers to purchase her paintings were soon flooding her inbox.   

VHS Girl’s paintings can be found in a number of important contemporary art collections including filmmakers (Jonathan Glickman, Larry Karaszewski), and curators (Gallery 30 South’s Matt Kennedy) –with over 1000 pieces in hundreds of private collections. Original art is rarely this affordable, and affordable art is rarely this collectible.