StoreKyle Nylund
Kyle Nylund is a freelance artist and designer working in the Calgary area. He received his Bachelor of Fine Art with a major in Fibre from the Alberta College of Art and Design. Kyle has actively participated in the Calgary arts community exhibiting his work at several galleries and special events such as the Alberta Fashion Week, Make Fashion, ArtaWEARness, Illingworth Kerr and the Endeavour Arts galleries. His involvement in performance art, fashion, theater and contemporary hoop dance have all informed his practice.
Kyle is originally from northern Alberta and has been accredited in several publications such as the Herald, FFWD, Avenue Magazine, and Swerve. He offers professional services in painting/drawing, fashion styling and costume design. His creativity and ingenuity, along with his intuitive understanding of materials, makes him an innovative bold artist, with a strong point of view. Check out his website at Kylenylund.com
My work continues to seek an internal notion of belonging. Through the development of character with the use of costume I have come to realize that the strength of my imagination, and its ability to suspend reality, allows me place of kindness and acceptance. As I continue to make costumes for myself and for others, I transfer my will to belong and hope that they too will understand the beauty of character and guise. Lately I have been dealing with belonging in regards to my own sexuality. Being gay and growing up in a small town, I was often left feeling as though I was a mistake, and would never manage to fit; thus I turned inward to a place of imagination and belonging. Now, as a male textile artist, I have carried those feelings into adulthood, and continue to turn inwards for comfort. By creating characters that I pull from my subconscious, and whom I deem sexually ambiguous, I hope to add to the discourse of what it means to belong in your own body or more specifically your own sexuality. Within the body of work that I am currently building I allow my internal self to manifest. I create characters from a world where there are no male or female rules, and we are free to act upon our sexual impulses regardless of taboos or societal implications. By manipulating the textile signifiers that delineate ‘maleness’ or ‘femaleness’, I have brought the ambiguity to life, and therefore have nullified all stereotypes and constraints that decide our categorization. A freedom emerges when in my costumes where we can all belong, even just for a short time, and it is that liberation that I wish to build upon.