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.
Kyle Meyer’s work has been installed in shows at the Bronx Museum of Art; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln; Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton; State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia and the Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao, among others. His first solo exhibition at the gallery opened in November 2018.