Your Boundary is My Trigger

Kyla Kegler, 2021

Artist Statement

The image on the reverse side of this statement depicts a germinating seed, mid-transition between nascent legume and living plant. The seed has been triggered to grow by the breach of the protective boundary that has delineated its very existence up until now. The sprout is situated in a grid. In this transformation from seed to plant, Sprout is experiencing many related but distinct new feelings. The pleasure of reaching Sprout's pliable cellulose extremities towards the sun will be bound up in an endless cycle of chasing unattainable satisfaction. Sprout feels excited for their new potential and nostalgic for the safety of their seed-form. Now they must contend with vulnerability to the elements, which inevitably sometimes results in broken shoots and roots, and with that, the new experience of feelings like shame and alienation.

Recently I remembered a thing I’d known and mastered as a child: talking about my thoughts, feelings, fantasies and life experiences as fiction. Constructing fictional relational paradigms provides a safe container for exploring real feelings. I take this approach to my painting, performance, video and installation endeavors respectively.

‘Your Boundary is My Trigger’ explores conceptual and material implications of the painted grid as a matrix that is both real and imagined—superimposed onto physical space and embedded into sociological landscapes and interpersonal relationships.

As a woman artist, I engage with painting as a means of grappling with pleasure, beauty and power: a tension worth chasing and disrupting. My interest in the grid began as an attempt to define logic within my intuitive relationship to aesthetic pleasure. The grid is an artificial container useful to an analytical process. I think about the world of these paintings—in which the grid is omnipresent, as a fictional paradigm wherein the value of power and beauty is up to me.

I combine contrasting mediums in layer upon layer: interference powders and shellac over thick beeswax crayon and glops of acrylic; coarse pumice paste ground into oil pastel and neon tempera; chalk resting atop the fibers of raw canvas. The Interaction of materials creates oscillation between chaos and order, flatness and texture, surface and interior.

“Your Boundary is My Trigger” includes conversational titles referencing news, culture and relationship theory such as ‘Communist Grid implicated in a Fascist Matrix’.