Artist Reception: kHyal
Event Details
Celebrate Earth Day on Wednesday, April 22 with a reception and artist talk with visual artist and environmental activist kHyal, joined by Westport artist Miggs Burroughs. Her exhibit Signs of the Times will be on display April 8 through May 31.
The reception will take place from 6 to 7 pm, followed by an artist talk from 7 to 8 pm.
About the Exhibit
Signs of the Times is an ongoing series by kHyal. Complex, and unclassifiable, kHyal’s mixed media work riffs off of pop culture icons and performs like a Rorschach Test in a behavioral science lab, tugging at the neurons of each viewer, and born to challenge perceptions. Using ordinary objects snatched from dumpsters, recycle centers, flea markets, tag sales, thrift stores, the ocean, and the street — assembled with raw precision in a dazzling cacophony of visual clutter — each piece decidedly explodes the human-centric flaws, foibles, and sometimes tragic outcomes of a plastic society.
kHyal’s work is an archeological dig, an observation of the mess we call mankind, in a rearrangement of the discarded ordinary into an awkward form of self-portraiture through vignettes of childhood memory, sometimes blended with current events.
About kHyal
kHyal is a self-taught environmental activist and digital art pioneer who has worked with recycled materials since the early 1980s. She created street art and found-object sculpture in Los Angeles before moving to New Haven, where she was among the first wave of self-taught artists to use personal computers to create immersive multimedia installations and live MIDI performances incorporating video and computer animation.
Sustainability has long been central to kHyal’s practice. She is a Certified Climate Reality Leader, a Beyond Plastics advocate trained by former EPA administrator Judith Enck, and a Project Limulus Beach Captain conducting horseshoe crab conservation as a citizen scientist along the Connecticut coast. She is a graduate of the NYC Department of Sanitation’s Trash Academy and a Save the Sound Cleanup Captain, and is a member of Clean Creatives, Break Free from Plastic, and the Plastic Pollution Coalition.
From 2022–23, kHyal was part of the global team invited by Seth Godin to support climate action through The Carbon Almanac. She spearheaded the online sustainable fashion resource guide, contributed to the LinkedIn Learning course 34 Things to Know About Carbon and Climate, created content for The Daily Difference, and produced a standalone event as part of the worldwide book signing. The Carbon Almanac received the “Most Insightful Data Book” award for Data Literacy.
kHyal has been an invited speaker at the Yale School of Sustainability, a featured guest on the Climate Gist and EarthWork Collective podcasts, and a recipient of a Connecticut Office of the Arts Artists Respond grant for an environmental justice project. She has also spoken on climate and plastic pollution at NYPL, MoCA CT, the School of Visual Arts, the Connecticut Art Directors Club’s As We Create podcast, and Earthworks: Unhurried Conversations.
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For more about the Library's art exhibits, visit the Art at the Library page.
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