Statement

For me, making art involves many private/in my own head conversations with artists around me, with my partner, with friends and with family. Conversations with my dad, in particular, weave through my work as I reflect on how he taught me to use a camera when I was very young as well as many ways of seeing and considering architecture, art, landscape and how we exist as humans within these spaces.

I use art to queer the places around me, recording my surroundings with my camera and then transforming these images in the studio with many different tools and materials. What start as photos, over time in the studio using paint, printmaking, and collage, become installations made up of fragments of artworks – existing somewhere in between built structures, photography, textiles, and representations of nature.

My installations take many forms, but often involve a range of media such as 2D works, photos and video projections. Other components might include architectural interventions with open walls, painted beams, and windows. More recently, within these constructed architectures, I bring in textiles, chairs, and floor pieces that allow the spaces to be inhabited in new ways. These altered spaces often invert interior and exterior and the relationship between two- and three-dimensional space.

The sense of potential and permission that exists in reconstructing architecture inspires my work. While the making of the work tends to involve a personal/internal conversation of understanding the world around me and who I am within it, the spaces themselves are intended to be open. I invite viewers to shape their experience in relation to the art, either alone or in a group.

Bio

Cybele Lyle is a California-based artist whose installation, video and 2D work explores place and identity by reconstructing her surrounding architecture, interior space and natural environment. Cybele graduated from Oberlin College with a BA in Environmental Studies, then went on to get a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in Printmaking and an MFA in Painting/Combined Media from Hunter College in New York in 2007. She has held residencies at Ox-Bow, Project 387, Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Recology, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her works have been exhibited across the United States including at the 205 Hudson St Hunter Gallery, New York; Bemis Center, Omaha; Oakland Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Orange County Museum of Art, and Et al. gallery, San Francisco, among others. Cybele is a recipient of the Kala Fellowship, the Yozo Hamaguchi Printmaking award, and the Tony Smith Award. Cybele currently lives in Los Angeles and is represented by Et al. Gallery in San Francisco.

Born in Pasadena, CA

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA