Kyle Hackett

Lives and works in Washington, D.C., USA

Artist statement

My paintings explore race, class, and social standing through approaches to self-representation and the constructed image. Inspired by nineteenth-and twentieth-century portraiture and precarious modes of depiction, I deconstruct ideas of secure identity and fixed-painting techniques through subtexts of the staged, self-aware portrait. Referencing contraptions, braces, or postures from early photography that might objectify and hold a sitter in place, I relate image-making, inflection, and fixedness to concepts of double consciousness. A connected body of work involves vanitas still life paintings created from discarded self-portrait reference photographs. Quickly compressed, twisted, fixed, bound, doubled, and hung, the discarded images take on new forms. Meanwhile, the slower process of making each painting becomes a living record and reflection on the initial need to discard the reference. I explore format, figure-ground relations, and simultaneous spaces. Within this process, my work combines strategies of expanded portraiture and still-life with the power dynamic and nature of the picture plane. Often using indirect glazing approaches to layer an image, I consider how content exists in between spaces, subjects, and beneath painted surfaces. How can slowing down views challenge understood relationships between the image, surface, and material? At the same time, how can this process reveal insights into the psychological state of the painter and the painting? By...

Artwork