Kyle Vincent Singer

Earbuds in. Music on. Load the bar. Lift. Lift. Lift Lift.
Earbuds in. Music on. Prep the paint. Pour. Pour. Pour. Pour.

Friend of a Friend is pleased to present Kyle Vincent Singer’s first-ever solo exhibition, SLOPMAXXXING, which presents an honest effort to define the artist’s desire for accumulation
and improvement in relation to the limitations of abundance.

Singer uses art making and weightlifting to cope with the burden of overstimulation and consumer culture by exploring the line where excess becomes the product itself. Combining discarded consumer goods, commercial grade expandable foam, and OOPs mistint paint samples, he layers rep after rep after rep onto armatures that transform beyond coherent
compositions. Singer’s approach, however, is much more considered than wandering selection and application. For example, he might include a chain-link fence gifted to him from a friend, a wire grid, or a stack of graduate school Art History books as a third leg of a coffee table to undergird hundreds of layers of paint, or a tissue thin McDonalds bag. These gestures are subtle allusions to how external bodies and interior states of mind can only handle so much before it needs a more sturdy but not always optimal support.

In works such as his “globs”, Singer uses the readily available Great Stuff expandable foam to be both form and understructure while adding layers of shiny and saturated acrylic paint on top. As attention seeking as these are, they lazily sag and slide off their surfaces giving a hallucinatory impression as an uplifting redirection from the weight of gravity imposed on all the drips and droops of the sculptural mediums. And thus many of the works in the exhibition must
be propped up. With constant trend cycles and aesthetic flip flopping over the course of decades, Singer splits the difference throughout the exhibition by placing slouching cups made from thin layers of paint and very inorganically formed mutant plants on modern shelves and furniture that are designed by the artist. In other works we cannot see the skeletal structure keeping them upright, but our imaginations begin to fill the interior space and in a sense, the viewer becomes part of the support system. This is an inherent counterbalance in the Singer’s work where the heroic effort of a weightlifting session in front of a mirror is contrasted by the solitude of art making in a mostly abandoned warehouse awaiting an ever-postponed renovation. The labor and the artwork itself becomes the reflection of a world he lives inmentally and physically. They are small monuments to our
current time where we are sold unlimited objects (and more than ever non-objects via subscriptions) through increasingly nefarious means. This exhibition is a process of both exposure and containment within the notion that too much is never enough…until it is. In the end Singer’s body and art practice are absent from a static universe. Each neon dot is a bicep curl. Every squeeze of the Great Stuff can is a deadlift. And each paint pour a calf raise.

Kyle Vincent Singer (b. 1990) is a Denver based artist who received his Bachelor of Arts from Eastern Illinois University and a Master of Fine Arts from with a Focus in Drawing at Colorado State University where he was the recipient of the Highest Achievement in Visual Arts in 2017. Singer has played a key role as an artist and contributor with a permanent installation at Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station, and is a former resident of Redline’s RiNo ArtPark. He collaborated
with artist Brandon Vargas in a two-person exhibition at Alto Gallery and has participated in numerous group exhibitions at the Evans School, Dateline, Adams State University, and the
Denver Theater district.