Kyle Hackett
Manipulating the authority of representational portraiture, I
deconstruct historical ideas of secure identity and fixed painting
techniques. I highlight contingencies between self and the
constructed image as I attempt to clarify my contemporary hopes,
fears, and insecurities about racial and socioeconomic progress.
By putting myself in the position of sitters from precarious
nineteenth- and twentieth-century modes of portrayal, I create
work rooted in the need for empathy and a historical desire for
connection and feeling.
Using multilayered academic painting approaches, I deconstruct
the technical and social fabric created by, but not limited to,
art-historical traditions. Through a form of self-representation,
I emphasize conflicts between the inner and the outer in order
to foster new realities and new ways of being understood as not
brown or white, wealthy or poor, but human. Often acknowledging
the incapacity of classical methods for telling the truth, I stress
ideas of vulnerability, false glamorization, and the anxiety of
reconciling the past with the present.


