Studio Spotlight: Cyle Warner
October 10th, 2020
It was a beautiful Sunday when I flew over(I'm a ghost, you remember) to Cyle Warner's studio in Brooklyn NY. The moment I walked in, deep warm energy seized me. He has been using the basement as his temporary studio visit space due to the new regulations at school studios.
We had a lovely conversation about his new body of work that he produced over the quarantine-summer and I am so excited to share his work with you.
"I just moved all my work from Rockland, NY, and my space in Manhattan, so it’s nice to have everything in the same spot in Brooklyn for the most part. However, this pace will most likely be used for storage and viewing while school is sessions, and I do most of my work in my dorm room."
"This piece, “Bodies That Reside in the Sun,” is an excellent example of where my mind is when it comes to the use of material, but I still feel conflicted about what my messaging for my work would be."
"Just a detail shot, but it always reminds me that my work suffers when it’s photographed."
"This idea of using fabric in this strip manner is highly influenced by St.Kitts Sugar Mas characters called Masqueraders.
The use of fabric as rope relates to compressed information as well as bondage."
"I feel like people of the African Diaspora, especially those in the Caribbean, have a unique sensibility with combining attributes from different countries all over the planet to create new emergent cultures. As a result, I feel that I have to emulate this aspect by pulling from various art periods and techniques to allow something new to emerge from it."
"I feel that fabric is the most natural material for myself, considering how often we interact with it daily. Furthermore, it has so many different meanings: from comfort and shelter to identity and history; thus, it lends itself to so much more complexity than paint."
"When looking at my art and what artists have influenced my work, I’d look at Jack Whitten, Mark Bradford, and Leonardo Drew and some younger artist Anthony Akinbola and Vaughn Spann. I appreciate what they do with the different materials they implore, but they all come to a different conclusion of what materiality ads their work."
