Swazi craft meets digital photography in Kyle Meyer’s astounding woven photos of a silenced LGBTQ community
Kyle Meyer (born 1985) has worked between eSwatini (formerly Swaziland) and New York City since 2009, creating richly tactile artworks as conceptually complex as they are visually lush. In this debut monograph, Meyer's portraits from his Interwoven series fuse digital photography with traditional Swazi crafts, giving voice to silenced members of the LGBTQ community. Tension between the necessity of the individuals to hide their queerness for basic survival and their desire to express themselves openly inform both the subject and the means of fabricating Meyer’s unique works.
Each piece from the Interwoven series is labor-intensive, taking days or sometimes weeks to complete. Meyer often photographs his subjects wearing a traditional headwrap made from a vibrantly colored textile. He then produces a print of the portrait and shreds it, together with the fabric from the headwrap, weaving the strips into patterned three-dimensional works. The final portrait presents each person’s individuality while using the fabric as a screen to protect their identity. Included in each copy of this book is a unique piece of fabric torn from the remnants of the Interwoven project, intended to serve as a bookmark.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Kyle Meyer: Interwoven.'
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AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers
Jennifer Morla
As much as I like an all typographic cover, I am equally impressed by a photographic cover that captures my attention. The interior, with bookmark, demonstrates the attention to detail inherent in the artist's work.
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Featured spreads are from Kyle Meyer: Interwoven, a 2020 staff favorite from Radius Books and Yossi Milo. Collecting Meyer's astonishing woven photographs of the eSwatini LGBTQ community wearing traditional women's head wraps, this book brilliantly—and necessarily—both conceals his subjects' identities and draws attention to the fact that they do also yearn to be seen. For gay men in eSwatini—where nearly 28 percent of the population is HIV positive or living with AIDS—wearing these headwraps in public is taboo. After Meyer photographs each sitter, he hand-shreds the print and weaves it together with strips of the fabric they wore, "creating a series of larger-than-life portraits that are both flat and dimensional, both digital and handmade," Todd J. Tubutis writes. "This physical duality generates visual contradictions: as objects, they simultaneously veil and reveal, adorn and undress, decorate and strip, confront and retreat. They invite you to look closely, then demand you step back. Your eye is quickly drawn to scrutinize patterns in the fabrics, then it suddenly zooms out to grapple with composition. Just as you begin to discern the sitter’s silhouette, you are startled by their confident return gaze." continue to blog
Published by Radius Books/Yossi Milo. Interview with Andy Campbell.
Swazi craft meets digital photography in Kyle Meyer’s astounding woven photos of a silenced LGBTQ community
Kyle Meyer (born 1985) has worked between eSwatini (formerly Swaziland) and New York City since 2009, creating richly tactile artworks as conceptually complex as they are visually lush. In this debut monograph, Meyer's portraits from his Interwoven series fuse digital photography with traditional Swazi crafts, giving voice to silenced members of the LGBTQ community. Tension between the necessity of the individuals to hide their queerness for basic survival and their desire to express themselves openly inform both the subject and the means of fabricating Meyer’s unique works.
Each piece from the Interwoven series is labor-intensive, taking days or sometimes weeks to complete. Meyer often photographs his subjects wearing a traditional headwrap made from a vibrantly colored textile. He then produces a print of the portrait and shreds it, together with the fabric from the headwrap, weaving the strips into patterned three-dimensional works. The final portrait presents each person’s individuality while using the fabric as a screen to protect their identity. Included in each copy of this book is a unique piece of fabric torn from the remnants of the Interwoven project, intended to serve as a bookmark.
