Joel Kyack brings together a combination of unlikely components purchased from hardware stores, health care industries and Hollywood prop-houses to create surreal, darkly humorous objects and paintings that evince a dysfunctional and chaotic social context as their origin. Kyack maintains a Dadaist anti-bourgeois position rejecting ‘taste’ and traditional aesthetic sensibilities. He instead finds pragmatic yet subversive relationships between functional objects to achieve an outcome that relates back to the body and to the abject absurdity of the individual in relation to a disturbing and complex social world, always with the potential for violence and the grotesque.
Joel Kyack was born in 1972 in Pennsylvania, USA. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995, studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 2004, and received his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2008. Recent solo projects include, Time Time Time, Francois Ghebaly (online) for Gallery Platform LA; I am the present, General Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Hold On Tightly / Let Go Lightly, Workplace, London, UK; and Black As Night And Thicker Still I Surrender To This Hill My Will, Campbell Hall, Los Angeles, CA.
He is represented by Workplace Gallery in the UK, François Ghebaly in Los Angeles and Praz-Delavallade in Paris. Joel Kyack lives and works in Los Angeles, California.