Kyra Henley
See World
6 – 21 October 2023

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Exhibitions
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Press release 

Nasha presents See World, Kyra Henley’s debut solo exhibition with Nasha Gallery.

Have you ever seen the inside of a penguin’s mouth? Waddling around all cute but beneath that benign exterior lies a backward-toothed nightmare tube built to shred flesh with an amoral efficiency you could only see replicated on an un-unionised Amazon factory floor.

That is Kyra Henley’s painting. Just as the penguin disarms you with its slick little nature tuxedo, she spends an inordinate, almost obsessive, amount of time mixing colours compared to actually applying them to perfectly mimic the palette of her source material (the ‘70s & ‘80s advertising), thereby soothing you with their very same promise of leisure never delivered.

The viewer is drawn in and coddled by easily readable titles like the ad copy they spore from. However, once you are in close, you notice the flatness of the image. You cannot enter these spaces. They are a collection of beguiling flats assembled on a back lot. And as the pastel promise of leisure fades, the paintings expose the full toothy gullet of late capitalism beneath that wants to
shred all into monetisable gulps.

In the blinding white arctic scream of ‘Seal’ we see a response to Landseer’s famously cursed ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’ but lit like a shopping aisle. For we are the nemesis of the piece now, not nature, and we are fully aware of it. A comfortable Boomer peacefully doubles his real estate portfolio by painting another (bringing it to 4 if you count the reflections and negative gearing).

The neoprene-uniformed serfs of ‘Dolphin Park’ ensure a stable supply of performed joy on the hour. Just beyond this cheaply constructed paradise of fascistically lined-up dolphins the dull turgid machine of capital thrums on in a space of tenuous visual logic.

In ‘Reservation’ bland extrusions of wealth enjoy an exotic meal provided by costumed victims of hospitality while paradise melodically laps at their backs.

Much like Van Gogh’s “Asniéres series documented the thrust of the factory into the landscape, these paintings are an elegy dedicated to Late-Capitalism’s terrifying end-game encroachment into the last market—our souls.

– Steven Charles William Latimer III