Talking Nature, Music and Magic with Kyle Peets

Artist-Educator Kyle Peets installed an exhibition “Willy-Nilly” at the Carnation Contemporary Art Gallery in Portland, Oregon. The installation, which ran through June 7-29th, plays with nature, magical thinking, and draws inspiration from Peets’ roots in Estonia. In May, Peets sat down with DEFUNCT’s Bex Heimbrock to talk about the upcoming exhibition, art and resistance. If you’re wondering why it took so long for this interview to be published, you can blame Bex for selfishly taking (admittedly far too much) time to move across the country and start grad school (sorry!). Here is the full interview, edited for clarity, grammar, style, and probably some other stuff too.

Kyle: [My] full name is Kyle Peets. But when when making art and putting it in the art world, I use my full name which is Kyle Adam Kalev Peets. Kalev is Estonian. My grandparents were refugees and so I use that to kind of honor them.

Bex: Okay, so we're in your studio. There's a lot going on. Is there anything in particular that you want to talk about? Any projects that you're excited about right now?

Kyle: Probably the most current one. So, I have a show that I'm installing in like 10 days. It's a show called Willy-Nilly. And it's a show of just screen print monotype. So that's a little bit different than normally like, as you know, from screen printing, you have a design and then you break it down into colors and you execute it. So screen print, monotypes are… monotype refers to like one of one. Each print is unique and so I've got a bunch of landscape images typically of the American West, of this area, the Columbia basin. And then I print using intuition on a variety of pieces of paper.

I will set up here and then have stacks of paper over here with a variety of sizes. So 11 by 14, 15 by 18. And I'll just choose an image and I'll like plug a color into it and start printing willy-nilly. So, it's a project that prioritizes intuition, mistakes, messiness over rational thinking.

But it really start[ed] like a couple years ago with just trying to change my practice, like trying to change it big time. I was making prints in the typical way, which is you design and then you execute. And there's not much room for discovery along the way. And you know, in the studio here, it has the ability to get out of your mind, to access different ways of thinking through the making process. 'Cause making is a different form of thinking than just, like, thinking. And usually that means having some kind of dynamic relationship with the thing you're making. And so I wanted to just make using intuition, as a way of just freeing that up.

I was thinking about, do you know, do you know the musical concept of polyphony?

Bex: Yes, actually!

Kyle: Multiple melodies, multiple voices, baroque music. I started thinking about the voice, I started thinking about how do I translate that into visual terms? And so I started thinking about the single authoritative lens of the camera as a voice, but also as a tool for colonization, especially in the context of landscape photography of the American West. And so that single authoritative lens being one perspective, also, you know, enforcing ideas of like rugged individualism, American mythologies of individual prowess. So I started thinking, well, maybe then the equivalent of multiple voices is multiple images taken from different perspectives … multiple voices, multiple melodies playing at once. And perhaps that could challenge a kind of Euro or Colonial centric way of thinking about images of the American West.

So that's how it started. It was like, I want to take polyphony and translate it into visual terms. And then I spent a year floundering doing that 'cause I was also working with color.

So, one new thing was working with intuition. Another new thing was working with color. Color is really hard. You can spend a whole lifetime getting to know how to use it. And so I struggled, uh, for a year, making a lot of prints I just wanted to throw up on or throw away that just, you know, I'm really unhappy with. Which then got me thinking about just value judgments in general and how again, when I come into this space here, my brain changes and the way I see the world changes. It’s a whole perspective shift. And so I challenged myself like, all right, for a full summer it's about quantity over quality. And when I come into this space, I'm gonna suspend judgment and just make things, and then see what happens, and then step back and then put on the more like, analytical cap and start to think about what's happening here.

What moments do I like, how do I kind of learn from that? And then leverage that. So, this project here, the Willy-Nilly project, is year three of doing that after learning from it. And it's gonna be a series of just prints on the wall. And there's a lot of repetition. A lot of, again, a musical influence, like from minimalism, like Steve Reich. Do you listen to Steve Reich, or do you know him?

Bex: [You can’t see it, but here I am shaking my head. I have no idea who Steve Reich is.]

Kyle: Or, or like Philip Glass, for example. Steve Reich does this thing where he takes musical strands and then he’ll chop one end of it off, so they will start to phase in and out of each other and then circle back. And so it creates these secondary patterns, tertiary patterns. And so I'm working a lot with layers and repetition in the same way. So you have your layers that then create these like secondary tertiary patterns, which is like tapping into another wavelength or another way of seeing or thinking. So, and then there's a reference too to Estonia, to my grandparents. Like, I just finished my statement for that show, and it's the first time calling my grandparents and Estonia into the work. And you know, Estonia was like the last country to be converted to Christianity in Europe, and today they're one of the least religious countries formally. So they have like the least amount of people that believe in God, but like, 80% of 'em believe they can talk to trees. So Pagan is a magical thinking and is still very much alive there. And so I'm calling that into the work.

So, this project has something to do with talking to trees and awe and magic, pre-verbal, uh, rational, adjacent kinds of thinking.

Bex: There's a lot there. Um, so these are troubling times, obviously. And um, I think part of what I've been thinking about a lot is the way that chat GPT and just the general mechanization of making art, so that there's no need for the labor of making art or the spontaneity of art itself. Which is one of the precursors of fascism, like, as so many thinkers have showed us. And it seems like this project that you're doing is leaning into the relationship with ‘the thing,’ right? The ‘object as you,’ but also problematizing that. So do you see your work as something that is subverting this sort of move towards a fascist state? Or, do you see it in a maybe less overtly political lens? Like, how are you navigating that?

Kyle: Yeah, I mean, I think all art making's political, 'cause you're sharing it with other people.

So if you think of political polis, amongst meaning, amongst others, that's inherently a political act. I'd say it's like in-between; that it's not fully conscious. You know, I think Chat GPT makes me feel like I've been left behind in the world and it feels deeply dystopic, and I hate it.

Not to mention any of the ethics of how much power and water it uses. I think in terms of writing and creativity, it's just gonna reduce everyone to a lower common denominator. My friends used to DM me on Instagram and say words, like, how are you doing? And now it's just reels thathave been fed to them by their algorithms. And they're the same as my algorithms.

And so all my friends are sending me the same videos that I've already seen, and so that's kinda a really dark flattening of just how you relate to other people.

And I think because of that, I've become more of a Luddite, but also I come from a time like, you know, I took ‘how to use the internet’ class in high school. So I knew life before the internet. I got my first smartphone when I was in grad school.

So it's a deep source of anxiety for me. So for personal reasons, I'm not on the internet. And I'm just kind of old school in that way. I have prioritized walking in the woods. Or gardening just as a form of survival. I think like then that leads to thinking about the natural world in a way that could be interpreted as political.

And so in that way it's indirect and less conscious. But then I think like that's a change in my life in general. Like I've gotten more scared of thinking and ideas. I became an artist 'cause I love ideas, and I love reading theorists and philosophers. I can't do that anymore, 'cause, you know, thinking also was a source of deep depression and anxiety for me, overthinking things. As a form of survival, I just like kind of stopped. And so this work, again, like beginning and operating mainly in intuition.

I think you could interpret that as a very different way of organizing material than algorithms. Especially in the context of like, of fascism or government control.

Bex: You used the word ‘magic.’ And I'm curious what that means to you, and if you can say more about how you find that in your life.

Kyle: Oh, that's a hard one. I feel like magic is like preverbal or beyond verbal. Um, I feel like magic cannot be commodified. And is a counter to commodification, to ownership, to power. And, you know, in the context of Estonia, magic and magical thinking was rooted in nature… I think a big part of that magic too is de-hierarchization. Like, challenging certain hierarchies that place us on top. And then that don't consider more than [the] human world or, or even like piles of trash as having agency. So that part like is totally influenced by new materialism. Object oriented ontology. Mm-hmm. So I still am unfortunately reading that stuff.

Bex: It seemed to me like a lot of what we did in your class resonated a lot with Adorno, especially when we were working with the very old machines. [I took a printmaking class with Peets, and learned so much! I highly recommend taking it if you are someone reading this who happens to be a student at Whitman.] Having to learn a new type of relationship with machine I thought was, was very like interesting and could be powerful.

Kyle: Are you thinking of like art in the age of mechanical reproduction?

Bex: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just found that really fascinating… Do you find that there's maybe a changing element of nature that you resonate with or that like influences your art in different ways.Um, what I'm thinking about there is that your use of the word magic, I think is also sort of adjacent to witchcraft. Which is, um, there's been a lot of ethnography done on how that also is deeply related to the natural world. Um, both as like a way of seeing and a way of explaining, although the term explaining I feel like has colonial implications. I mean like how do you see that, but also because you move so often, right? I mean, do you find joy in exploring the natural world and then bringing that into your art in these new locations? Or have you ever felt challenged or like stymied by the different terrains?

Kyle: This is the first time I've ever actually brought nature into the work, in the last three years. So it is a pretty different way of working. In terms of working directly with landscape photos, I've always worked with photos because I can't draw, but in terms of working with landscape photography, like with images of nature, and then trying to reconcile just the history of landscape in a sort of like Eurocentric way of making, that's all pretty new. That's all like within the last three years. So personally, like I always went out in nature wherever I was. Just, you know, I would go hike and recreate in it.

But I haven't really been thinking about it too much until recently, and that’s all been in Walla Walla. And I'm not sure why that happened. I think, one thing that changed in the work was, you probably saw that like in [my] early projects they were pretty idea based. You could call that conceptual art, the work was articulating a kind of like conceptual premise that had a paradox or a joke at the center of it that was meant to sort of like reveal a, like a crack in our rational thinking. And coming up with those premises was kind of difficult. I had a lot more ideas when I was younger, and I feel like I just kind of ran out of 'em.

And I think like maybe that has something to do what I was talking about earlier with like, my different relationship to thinking in general, especially like theoretical kinds of thinking. I'm much more drawn to the immediate and to the visceral. And I think that does start with just like, you know, I learned to garden three years ago.

Maybe that's where it all starts, but like, I learned to garden and I started learning about plants. And I started to become way more fascinated in a plant's version of intelligence versus my own ‘clever’ sense of it.

The thinking about nature really just started here in the last couple years.

Bex: Okay, looking towards the future, if such a thing is possible, do you have anything like coming down the pipe that you want to shout out or like anything that you're particularly excited about as you move?

Kyle: So I got the at Carnation Contemporary, which is an artist run collective that I'm a part of. Maria Lux, who's a professor here too, is a part of. So artist run collectives are a little different than commercial galleries, you know? … We pay, uh, monthly dues to keep the lights on, pay for the rent, but it means we can do whatever we want. So it's kind of like independent radio versus a commercial radio where you're trying to sell.

So, it's called Carnation Contemporary and it's really cool. So if you're ever in Portland, it's in the Kenton District. So that'll be out for June and it's called Willy-Nilly. And then after that I have no plans, but I'm hungry to get back in here. And I feel like another kind of shakeup thing I need, I'm gonna continue with this work.

This feels like a slow burn kind of work that can keep plugging away at. Which is nice. And I think like as I've gotten busier, it's harder to come up with the next big idea. And so if I have like an hour in between classes, I can just like slap a couple layers of ink onto paper here and there. So this is like a nice thing I can pick up and put down, pick up and put down without having to think about it. So I think like that will be a slow churning that will just continue for the years to come. But I do feel like I want to just shake things up again.

And all I want to do is make some weird ass shit.

That's all I wanna do. I wanna make something that kind of weirds me out and, uh, I'm not sure what that means. I have this phrase floating around my head. Raucous, irreconcilable. I can't tell you the source of where that comes from. It was like a review of a show in New York. I forget what it was, but some of my favorite work is so weird that you can only really laugh. Like, have you seen Holy Mountain?

Bex: Is that Monte Python? [Good guess, Bex, but no. You’re thinking of the Holy Grail. Dear reader - if you’ve read this far - please don’t laugh at me]

Kyle: So this is a very strange film and when I see something I can't perfectly make sense of, I usually just laugh. I wanna make something like that.

Bex: Well, that's exciting. Thank you for taking the time. This was really fascinating.

Kyle: Thanks. Yeah. Thanks for showing your interest.