Kyla Chevrier

September 3–October 25

Vernissage 5 à 7, September 12, 2013

In making a wager we extend an invitation to risk, relinquishing control but creating the opportunity for gain. There is something tempting about taking a bet, something that charms.

A wager once placed is deliberately incomplete, its resolution open to all  the hazards of chance. Ideas, and even individuals can possess the same ambiguous quality of the gambler’s gesture, as can physical spaces.

In such spaces, expectations of function and formality are purposefully blurred. The form is open ended but detailed to offer a viewer the opportunity for a constellation of projections and interpretations.

How does an interior space affect a conversation or the specific scale of a table affect a meal? These are small but important and observable discrepancies. This is not a judgment of taste but about unpacking regulation and exploring physical and psychological boundaries within an imagined field.

Two planes are constructed within the space. Each performs a different and contradictory role affecting the conditions of the room and the subjective physiological experience of the viewer. The planes are not autonomous; rather they generate one form within the frame of the room and share that space with the viewer.

Architecture is often meant to serve the best interests for the public; simple roles such as shelter or more complex aesthetic, social, or political functions. As a sculptor I’m interested in frustrating the expected conditions of space, and complicating them further through colors and narrative.

Artist’s statement

I want to generate a climactic experience in conjunction with time: a jouissance before and during and after. My work begins by choreographing planar fields to define a subject position through the regulation of space. Color offers me a means of creating relationships between architectural surface and embodied perception. Through models, prints and paintings I work with a set of assumptions that are never firmly established until the end of an installation. I challenge existing formalities within architecture through a flirtatious act, implicitly both aggressive and accommodating.

Bio

Kyla Chevrier is an artist from Ottawa, Canada and is currently working in New York City. She received her BFA in 2008 from Concordia, before graduating from Yale University’s MFA Sculpture program in 2010 where she was awarded the Toby Devon Lewis Foundation Grant. She has exhibited her work both in Canada and the U.S., as well as attended several residencies including The MacDowell Colony and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.