The confrontation of fears, memories and anxieties, as well as the influence of religion and spirituality in the development of our identity are the themes of Kyler Garrison's new melancholic airbrush painting exhibition displayed in Milan at Plan X Gallery from 22 April - 20 May 2023.

Hello Kyler! How long have you been painting? How did your artistic career start?

Well, this format of painting (airbrush) I've been working on for two or three years. I originally got into using the airbrush because I thought it was an excellent translation of how I grew up painting, which is doing a lot of graffiti. Where I grew up was super rural, in Colorado in the middle of nowhere and super early on I got into skateboarding and that opened up this alternate type of lifestyle compared to what I grew up around. Skateboarding opened up a lot of avenues for art and graffiti. Eventually, I moved on to working with airbrush and exploring that and doing a lot of experiments over the years making paintings, and when Marcello approached me with this opportunity I wanted to take it to create a body of work like this.

““A lot of my paintings touch on a lot of themes related to personal experiences such as my memories.””

Your new exhibition Body of armor refers to the biases and strategies we as individuals build as a way to keep us safe from our fears and anxieties, as well as what we find meaning in to keep going. How did the exploration of these themes come about?

The last couple of years I've been building up my practice, there's been a lot of trial and error of what I like to portray and what I like to paint especially with the hazy nature of the airbrush, I found out that a lot of my paintings feel very nostalgic so moving into this body of work I wanted to paint a lot about memory whether its good or bad and how this influences how we interact with people and moving through the world. Lots of these paintings were confrontations with things I have lived and feared, alongside those nods I have in regards to memory and experience, it's a confrontation of my fears of mortality and experience with religion as well. Because I think that religion provides a sense of continuity for life after death, it shapes a lot of your identity and it influences a lot of your actions, therefore influences actions the older you get. So that's why I wanted to explore these things with these paintings.

““A lot of these paintings are a way to sit with myself and articulate these thoughts and fears and anxieties of my past and my experience in a nonverbal way.””

What is the message that you’re trying to convey with your pieces?

For me personally, I wanted it to communicate confrontations of myself and the way I think and my anxieties but I think the body of work as a whole isn't necessarily supposed to answer any questions but it’s supposed to raise questions and self-reflection. I want viewers to see these and think about the themes and think about the role that religion and spirituality and anxieties play in their own life. I don't want it to answer any questions, I just want it to raise more of an afterthought of how these things can influence you and shape individuality.

““Moving to New York opened a lot of doors creatively and opportunities. Moving to a new place like that where I lived all of my life, there are all these doors that open and there’s a lot that I realized about my experience growing up and my memories. I think being in a place like that, being surrounded by a bunch of people making stuff like that, I felt that I finally could take these things and express them in this manner…””