For his Interwoven series, Kyle Meyer addresses Swaziland’s hyper-masculine culture by photographing its LGBTQ community. He creates an elaborate headwrap from fabrics chosen by each subject from textiles conventionally used for women’s headdresses. After taking the subject’s portrait and creating a large-scale print, Meyer hand-cuts the photograph and the head wrap into strips, weaving them together to create a textured, three-dimensional work. Meyer’s tapestries imagine a parallel world in which the queerness of his subjects may be expressed as brazenly as the bold patterns coloring the headdresses. Transformed and taking on a heroic or even mythological aura, the resulting colorful artworks both conceal and reveal the men’s identities, whose sexual orientation is illegal in their country.
Recent exhibitions include FILAM(A)NT – Between the seams, Fondation Blachère, Apt (2019); Shifting Gaze: A Reconstruction of the Black and Hispanic Body in Contemporary Art, Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando (2018) and Bronx Calling: The Fourth AIM Biennal, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2017).