Statement

I want to turn architecture inside out, inviting viewers into a reconstructed space that shifts the relationship between domestic interiors, architectural structures, and nature. My process begins with recording my surroundings through video and still photography, then transforming these images in the studio through paint, printmaking, and collage. These diverse fragments come together into immersive installations that exist somewhere in between built structures and 2-dimensional representations of nature.

Reconstructing architecture through a queer lens opens space for potential and permission – creating environments that resist conventional binaries and fixed categories. While the making involves a personal conversation of understanding the world and my place within it, the spaces themselves remain open-ended, inviting viewers to shape their own experience either alone or with others, creating moments of connection between built environment, image, and lived experience.

My installations combine photographs, paintings, and video projections with architectural interventions - open walls, painted beams, and windows. I work with the relationship between my constructed architecture and the gallery space itself. Can I expand how viewers experience space? Can the building's power shift to the person inside it, inverting the power from outside to within? Recently, I've introduced textiles, chairs, and floor pieces that allow these spaces to be inhabited differently, challenging the relationship between 2D and 3D space. Now the viewer is invited to sit and to be, and to look at the art if and when they want to. Perhaps peripherally.

Bio

Cybele Lyle is a Los Angeles-based artist whose installation, video and 2D works explore place and identity by reconstructing her surrounding architecture, interior space and natural environment. Lyle received a bachelor of arts in environmental studies from Oberlin College, a bachelor of fine arts in printmaking from California College of Arts, and a master of fine arts in painting/combined media from Hunter College. She has participated in residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida; Recology, California; and Headlands Center for the Arts, California. Her works have been shown at institutions, including Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; Oakland Museum of California; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa. Lyle is a recipient of the Kala Art Institute Fellowship, the Tony Smith Award from Hunter College, and the Yozo Hamaguchi Printmedia Award. Cybele currently lives in Los Angeles and is represented by Et al. Gallery in San Francisco.

Born in Pasadena, CA

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

2025 Who’s mountains are you? Et al. Gallery, San Francisco, CA  (forthcoming)

2024 Floating seeds make deep forms, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ

2021 Dance Desert at Et al. etc Gallery, San Francisco, CA