Redefining the spaces around us in multimedia

by Ryan Kost

Confronted with the realities we’re given, sometimes all we can do is try make our own. This sort of reconstruction sits at the heart of the artwork Bay Area artist Cybele Lyle has been making for years.

Through a combination of projections, sculptures, fabrics and photographs, Lyle has reimagined spaces, queering them, redefining them. It’s a radical act, particularly in a world that frequently asks the other to conform to the way things are. Her work, she has said in her artist bio, “examines issues of identity and social representation.”

Previous exhibitions have pulled viewers into places full of angles, where landscapes overlap — inside is outside, and up might even be down. Now Lyle is presenting “Bring Me Here, Now Take Me Away,” a new set of work at Et Al. Etc. in the Dogpatch neighborhood. She’s still working over these themes and ideas, but what’s on display marks a shift in her practice, a paring down of sorts.

Gone are the projections and installations. Instead, the focus of this exhibition is her newer, mixed-media work. The new pieces stem, in part, from a residency Lyle held this year at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County. During her time there, she photographed the surrounding landscapes, again interacting with place. She then took the images from that exploration and painted over them in strokes, adding her own personal gesture to what light had already made on the film. The paint conceals existing spaces while revealing new ones.