Unfinished Blueprint for the Future

Kyla Hansen, *Know The Wolves That Hunt You*, 2020/2021, Recycled denim, fabric, batting, thread, 72” x 72”

by Keeva Lough

Kyla Hansen’s suburban Los Angeles studio looks like a carpenter’s workshop - the smell of wood and denim hangs in the air. It’s a converted Mid-century garage, the kind of environment best suited for a hardass granddad. I’m in California on an art-seeing trip, and Hansen’s studio is our last stop on the way back home to Las Vegas, where the artist was born.

On the walls she has hung selections from her recent solo show, Hold Your Own, which opened in March 2023 at the Gallery at the Art Dealers Alliance in NYC. The work, a collection of wall-hanging sculptural assemblages, collage signifiers of blue-collar work into abstracted forms: blue jeans unstitched and spread like a deer carcass, hand-carved shovels twisted into challah, and a series of denim quilts.

I call them quilts, but really I find the pieces unclassifiable. And the more I hear Hansen speak, the more I’m confused, struggling to find a single word to sum them up. They are free-ranging and idiosyncratic, poking off in odd directions, their patterns chaotic and seemingly random, but constructed with a precise internal logic that I cannot seem to crack. They also have a small amount of dimensionality added by Hansen’s support structure which she demonstrates for me: the quilts have magnets stitched into the denim which match up with screws on half a wooden frame, built to mirror the unique, eccentric outlines of each quilt’s upper half. Acting like the frame for a stretched canvas, this hanging system means that the quilts can be displayed consistently. The free-hanging lower half waves slightly with strong breezes, accentuating their physicality and giving them an air of fragility; they can be pulled down with a strong yank, and rehung just as easily.

Kyla Hansen, *Hold Your Own* installation view at NADA Gallery, New York, NY, 2023

Okay, so they’re abstract quilts. Easy enough to wrap your head around. But I'm thrown for a loop when Hansen shows me a set of collages on a small drafting table. The collages combine photos of doors and blue denim into complex patterns. It takes a while for the obvious to hit me: the quilts are recreations of the photo-collages, their seemingly random composition the result of a simplified but precise rendering of the shadows and ornamentation of the doors in the source images.

There’s another layer of abstraction going on too, Hansen explains to me. The quilts have evocative and uneasy titles like Know The Wolves That Hunt You. These fragments of poetry are woven into the quilt itself - every composition begins as a piece of written script which Hansen stylizes and abstracts. These simplified, text-like shapes determine the outlines of each element of photo-collage, which then become the pattern for the quilt.

The queer logic of Hansen’s quilts now becomes explicable to me. They are the result of iterative transformation, their abstruse final form a record of both the intellectual and physical process of their creation. The act of following this winding path along with the artist feels meaningful in and of itself, a thought process that could continue on after the quilt is completed and which the viewer is invited to take up themselves. This openness is contrasted with the source imagery of doors - never doorways but doors, which are always implicitly shut. A shut door can be a sign of inaccessibility and confinement, but it can also provide the confined with a sense of protection. I think of the queer sort of protection that the closet provided (and provides) to Queer people. But if you know the wolves that hunt you, then you know a door isn’t always enough.

Hansen’s denim blue jeans strike me as a particularly Queer material. The use of denim to create heavy-duty work pants was popularized in 19th Century Reno, Nevada, by a Jewish immigrant named Jacob Davis, who served the mining community there as a tailor and fabric craftsperson. What was revolutionary about Davis’ design was that he reinforced the pockets with copper rivets, making them stand up to strenuous use by laborers. Over time the pants went from practical to fashionable - by the 1950s the pants had become associated with communists, Beatniks and white rock n’ rollers who wore the pants to signal their working class allegiance and aversion to bourgeois respectability.

There’s a lot of tough guy performativity wrapped up in blue jeans. You need these heavy duty pants because you’re so blue collar, working hard with your hands, getting dirty and kicking ass - all the things coded as uniquely masculine in a patriarchal society. These associations were not always true back when blue jeans first gained widespread popularity, and they are especially untrue today. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 80% of Americans are employed in service industries. With an overwhelming majority of Americans working in offices, hospitals, restaurants, and retail stores, why do we continue to play-act as farmers and miners? America is engaged in a widespread drag performance.

The gays have always understood this. At underground gay bars and sex clubs, “leather/Levi’s” remains a common dress code. The gay leatherman in ripped blue jeans is also engaged in a masculine performance, and if he wouldn’t call it drag I certainly would. There’s also the archetype of the “blue jean lesbian” dressed in denim and work boots, whose subtly gender-nonconforming fashion sense harkens back to days when seeing a woman wearing such masculine clothing would be a cause for scandalous whispers. While I think contemporary straight men’s masc-signaling drag is pathetic, these Queer adoptions strike me as subversive and liberating in their marriage of male, working class aesthetics with non-hetero, non-normative sexualities. This unstable and ambiguous combination suggests a world of possibilities outside patriarchy. Hansen’s mix of masculine and feminine labor points to the same endless horizon.

Kyla Hansen, *Glass Looker*, 2022, Found clothing, fabric, batting, thread, 46" x 43"

Two of Hansen’s quilts, X and Glass Looker, feature fringed white jeans stitched into crosses with gaping holes at their centers. The holes suggest a void at the center of a white capitalist society that idealizes a masculine myth of heroic labor, while subjugating the working classes who actually perform that labor. Maybe. At the same time I feel that the fringed hole, the opposite of the phallus, represents a feminine reclaiming of masculine iconography. Perhaps these two notions are not so contradictory after all, instead representing two points on a train of nonlinear thought.

Hansen’s art is animated by a consideration of labor, but as I left her studio what stuck in my mind was the mental labor her work represented: the process of approaching a material or image, working and reworking it, not for the sake of reaching a definite conclusion but rather as an exercise with its own inherent value. We’re living in unstable times and there’s a lot of work to be done. Hansen provides us with an intentionally unfinished blueprint.

Sources:

https://www.jmaw.org/davis-levi-reno-jewish/

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm

Keeva Lough is an artist and educator living in Las Vegas. She can be found on Instagram at @lough.culture.

Images courtesy of the artist.

Posted and published by Ellie Rush on October 4, 2023.