Kyle Choy
Tyler School of Art and Architecture
Arrangement 5
28" x 19" x 33.5"
Foam, acrylic paint, acrylic medium, artificial grass, paper
2022
Arrangement 6
15" x 13" x 46.5"
Wood, foam, acrylic paint, acrylic medium, rock, artificial grass
2022
Artist Biography
Kyle Choy is an artist from Lincoln, Nebraska best known for exploring a wide range of materials on constructed objects and surfaces. His work is both self-referential and meta, playing with ideas of reality versus fiction, otherness, and transformation. Heavily inspired by literature, he both utilizes storytelling to talk about and generate more reference material for his work and the idea of writing, drafting, and revising to compose sculptural arrangements that can be altered from day to day and show to show. He earned his BFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2013 and his MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture and currently resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Artist Statement
Upon walking into the room, I was left with more questions than answers. Those objects were simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, like a remembered fragment of a dream stitched together from known experiences and unknown intuitions. They appeared to be in a state of figuring their selves out, endlessly defining, undefining, and redefining themselves. And I caught them at their most vulnerable; mid-metamorphosis, frozen in shock; all their materiality, construction, referencing, and re-referencing exposed. I couldn’t stop myself from helping them build themselves. I gifted them – or perhaps even cursed them with – stories, memories, experiences, dreams that were once my own or ones I heard from others but then became something else entirely in their possession. My projection further transformed them.
It was probably unfair of me to do so, especially without their permission and with the assumption they had none of their own. After all, one does not change in a vacuum, without intent, or without self-reflection; these all require those aforementioned “gifts”. However, I felt a kinship looking at those constructs whose identity, purpose, and “wholeness” was in question –a question that was then reflected back onto me. I hoped for them to reach a point of satisfaction, one where they’d be happy with their state of being even just for a moment. Though, perhaps that’s just me, simply projecting again.