Artists in Morris: Kyle Hackett
Inspired by the concept of a reading room, Intervals of Study: Space & Interior Relations brings together finished paintings and drawings with the studies, references, and material experiments that inform them. For Kyle Hackett, these works offer a way to consider the language of painting and drawing as something continually shaped through looking, questioning, and making. By presenting the process alongside the finished work, the exhibition creates space to consider an artistic practice not as a fixed destination, but as an ongoing process of figuring things out over time.
Exploring relationships between architecture, memory, material, and personal history, the exhibition unfolds through distinct groupings and spatial interventions. Works such as Forward Restraint and After Arrival demonstrate Hackett’s interest in material recirculation, transforming remnants of earlier work into new inquiries. The After Builder Series #1–4 draws on discarded portrait references and vanitas traditions, physically twisting, binding, tearing, and doubling images to explore tension, constraint, and release. Elsewhere, After Taylor Hall Study considers institutional memory through Hackett’s return to the University of Delaware, while For A.G. Gaston (Birmingham) brings familial photographs into conversation with the history of Birmingham’s A.G. Gaston Motel.
Together, these works explore the spaces between image and object, memory and history, and study and resolution. Intervals of Study invites viewers to linger within these intervals—to consider how meaning develops through the act of making, revisiting, and looking again.
About the Artist:
UD Alumnus Kyle Hackett, AS11, is an acclaimed painter whose work explores race, class and social standing through self-representation and constructed imagery. His paintings have been widely exhibited and featured in publications including The Washington Post and New American Paintings. Click here for more on Hackett and his artwork.