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Willy-Nilly: Kyle Adam Kalev Peets
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
Estonia was one of the last European countries to be forcefully converted from Paganism to Christianity. Today, Estonia is one of the least religious countries in Europe. Only a small percentage of Estonians believe in God, but most believe they can talk to trees. This body of work has something to do with that.
This project begins with a slow turn back to the artist’s Estonian roots to embrace pre-Christian magical thinking, animism, awe and wonder. Kyle Adam Kalev Peets employs an advanced print technique called Willy-Nilly, which prioritizes intuition, failure and chance over logic. Layering and repetition are used to create hypnotic rhythms that look back to ancient spiritual technologies that disrupt logical thinking, like spinning in a circle or repeating a word over and over. The layering of multiple photographs onto one picture plane challenges the Western obsession with the individual, especially as the single authoritative lens of the camera enforces it. These kinds of images obstruct legibility but also surface new forms of reading. Layering creates pictorial anomalies and abstractions that confuse the relationship to nature as it’s mediated through images. As an alternative tool for understanding, revealing the hidden by challenging how landscape pictures look.
Kyle Adam Kalev Peets is a multi-disciplinary artist-educator and plant lover. He has had solo exhibitions at Carnation Contemporary, Platte Forum gallery (Denver, CO), as well as group exhibitions like Art Shanty on the frozen White Bear Lake (Minneapolis, MN). His work was published in the periodical SPRTS by Endless Editions (New York, NY), archived in the Watson Library Special Collections, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, Manhattan, Artists’ Books. He received his MFA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa as well as a Graduate Certificate in Book Arts from the Iowa Center for The Book. Kyle currently teaches Print and Book Arts at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.