KYLE YOUNG

PUSH PLAY

Mar 7  –  Apr 2  2012

PUSH PLAY is exactly what Kyle Young has done recently.  Taking a pause from his studio to work on other ventures, he has picked up the remote and pushed ‘play’ again.  Returning to the studio has proven to be a continuation from where he left off approximately eight years ago.  His early works of cellular forms have slowly evolved into abstractions and have a clear and progressive ‘push’ in this body of work, now showing at Art Palace, Houston.

PUSH PLAY reveals a kind of unit, or wholeness, mirroring the nature of the world, in which the viewer struggles to exist between the flow and flux within the unit itself.  Young’s use of colors and shapes, reduced to the curvilinear segments and deliberate portions of the whole, create a tension and a pull, or a ‘push’, between the two fields, creating a new whole.

The definition of whole, containing all components of something complete and not divided or disjointed, is exactly what Young forms through the use of reduction.  Reducing the ‘wholeness’ to an assemblage of the elements, by the path and direction of destruction and division, allows for a new wholeness to emerge.  The new whole begins where the division and destruction ends.

In the progression of Young’s works, beginning more than 20 years ago, the biological references and influences  have always maintained a  natural system that is open to outer influences.  Briggs and Peat write that most works are viewed as a closed coherent entity within the flow of events around them.  However, Young takes the evolution of his cellular shapes to the point of “maintaining their identity only by remaining continually open to the flux and flow of their environment.”  The pieces in PUSHPLAY represent an exposure to the viewer, and the reception by the viewer puts the context of the work’s environment into a range of experiences, understandings and perceptions.  All natural systems are engaged with outer influences and PUSH PLAY is once again, open for reception.