Humanoids and Human Vice: A Look Into the Art of Kylee Jo

"The Male Graze," 2018, acrylic, ink, wood, fabric, carpet,

beet juice, Tazmanian Devil mirror, 84" x 60"

Despite our shared preference for the west coast, I first met Kylee while I was still in Florida and attending college. Having been her classmate at University of Florida, I felt privileged that I was able to watch her creative process unfold in our shared studio periods. Kylee made compelling drawings, paintings, and installations throughout college and would often speak out about uncomfortable and omnipresent issues such as the male gaze and polarized gender roles, which she preferred to address with levity and humor. At one point during our overlapping college career, she painted a photorealistic man with his back turned to the viewer. He sported a cowboy hat, a moustache unrivaled in size and thickness, and showed off a very bare ass. This painting, cleverly titled "The Male Graze," commemorates a photo from a magazine called Playgirl (a spinoff of Playboy): “I based that painting off a photo from Playgirl magazine. Playgirl is pretty awesome. They were bigger in the 70s and 80s I think, and they’ve been discontinued today,” she explained. Kylee creates a connection between the lowbrow themes of her work and her artistic style by replicating the feeling of animated kids' shows. She will sometimes toggle between the cartoon realm and the more realistic realm within the same pictorial space, combining two disparate styles in a manner that allows reality to intercept a sprawling "pretend" environment at chosen moments. Figures in her drawings and paintings vary in form, challenging viewers of her art to digest an orchestrated cacophony of humanoid bodies intermingling with regular human bodies. 

The intricacies in Kylee’s 2D artwork are expanded upon by her use of 3D objects. The artist uses a very eclectic and unexpected palette of random objects including fabrics with cheesy prints, small pieces of furniture, stuffed animals, pillows, and even hand-painted,  hand-crafted pieces of wood that add dimension to her pieces. Despite these objects' lack of shared qualities, the finished piece is not only coherent (though chaotic), but also harnesses the viewer’s interest for an extended period of time. Her artworks remind me of artifacts from a made-up world. While Kylee’s art might seem like an escape from reality, its immediacy and “realness” parallels the way we experience our reality. Kylee’s installations, in particular, are so transformative; it’s as though she single-handedly removed a chunk of the real world and replaced it with the reality she has conceived. As otherworldly as the aesthetic of her art is, the ideas behind it bear a striking resemblance to the very ideas that dictate our lives on Earth, and more specifically, in America.

"Angels, from Afar," 2021, acrylic, fabric, foamboard, 

faux fur, cut out from Playgirl magazine

Kylee’s art breathes in the parts of society that are most certainly repressed in public dialogue: cheap thrills, sexual fantasies, and the persisting male gaze. Without filtering any of these taboos out, Kylee’s art exhales a remixed version of our lived-in “fantasies.” Inspired by amusements and attractions of the kitsch variety such as neon signs, diners, theme parks, and Las Vegas, along with multiple media forms under a similar umbrella, such as vintage horror and gore movies, Sid and Marty Krofft, Pee Wee's Playhouse, Ren and Stimpy and traditional paintings... Kylee’s art regurgitates “American trash.” Her world is an imploding man-made Utopia, discharging cartoon creatures, gazing women, and fully exposed “pervy” men in unpredictable and explosive compositions.  As she stated during our recent conversation, “I’ve always been interested in the male gaze and gender norms, and like kind of… hyperbolizing them and making fun of them.” Through candy-colored alternate realities, she opens the door for feminine fantasy. One of her 2021 works titled “Inside Angels/Processing request for” shows a scaled-up woman squeezing multiple men. “It’s really easy for straight men to find pleasure in imagery everywhere, and I think with the male gaze it’s like, they’re the pleasure seekers, and the feminine body is the one that’s always being looked at. That’s something I’m very interested in... I still think there’s a long way to go,” she asserted. What if women could fantasize about men in a way that is as fast, cheap, and superfluously available as porn, porn-adjacent media, and porn-adjacent live experiences such as strip clubs - all of which are built to satisfy heterosexual men?

"Inside Angels/Processing request for," 2021, acrylic, fabric, ink, 23''x18''

Kylee’s interest in both the fabrication and prolificacy of “family-oriented” tourism ads and themed spaces and, simultaneously, the subversion of familial values taking place behind closed doors is something she describes as an interest in a hidden yet perceivably ugly truth. While a lot of art is made to be beautiful, Kylee’s art is willfully unglamorous. During our conversation, Kylee told me a bit about her life outside of her artistic practice. I found out more about her seasonal jobs in national parks and how her work on scenic trails have involved intense physical labor, including firefighting. When I asked Kylee if her natural surroundings in some of the most scenic regions of America influence her work, she responded by telling me how she prefers to focus on human vice and its most homely parts. “I don’t think my work is really influenced by nature. I’m more interested in uglier things...I’m interested in making more art with themed restaurants and theme parks and weird attractions like Las Vegas...because [those] things are presented in such a colorful and easy-to-consume way. I want to use that mode to present these f*cked up issues in American culture. “ She explained further - “I have found a lot of inspiration in the misogynistic, creepy, and gross things men say and do as I've worked on crews of all or mostly men in the male-dominated field of outdoor labor.” If sexual fantasy in America is a half-silvered mirror within which society stares upon illusions of hypersexualized women in its reflection, the scenes in Kylee’s artwork reveal the voyeuristic stance of caricatured demons concealed behind fully-tinted glass. 

To view more of Kylee’s work, visit her website (kyleejoart.com). She also posts her work on her Instagram (@miss_jr_incontinence).