About Kyle

Biography

Kyle Selley (b. 1992) is a Kansas City, Missouri native, currently teaching and creating in Gainesville, Florida. He is best known for his Firework Residue Paintings, exploring ideas surrounding nostalgia, spirituality, and the sublime. A seven-page showcase article in KC Studio Magazine describes his flatwork as "amorphous and suggestive of infinite space." Selley works playfully and intuitively as he guides fireworks toward an expressive composition and archives the results. His abstract visual language often explores an inner spiritual landscape injunction with concepts like transcendence and the sublime.

Selley's Firework Art utilizes mediums such as videography, digital imagery, performance, ceramics, and works on paper, canvas, and plexiglass. His work set a new precedent in artistic techniques incorporating firework residue. Selley has been nourishing a relationship with fireworks since early childhood, using them creatively and experimentally long before beginning to create fine art.

Several art institutions have endorsed and promoted his work, including nine solo shows, four duo exhibitions, and over two dozen group exhibitions. SNW Gallery and Leawood Fine Art Gallery currently represent Selley. Dominator Fireworks in Beijing, China, sponsors him. Selley graduated from Johnson County Community College with an Associate of Arts degree, studied sculpture and ceramics at the University of Tasmania, and graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the University of Florida.

artist statement

I draw with explosive residue. Explosions and their indexical marks are naturally celestial, producing tactile remnants that echo stellar formations. Across scales, I've found patterns of residual dust, energy radiating outward, order surfacing through chaos, and fractals emerging.

Combustible material inscribes traces of an event. I guide it, but this medium expands mark-making beyond the capabilities of my hands. There's tension between control and volatile chance. I bend to what the material insists upon. Chaos theory and emergence theory describe these scale-invariant principles, which govern supernovae and fireworks alike. The work collapses cosmic distances to human scale, making stellar nebulae accessible for close investigation.

With residue as primary content, I reframe the explosion as contemplative echoes rather than spectacle. The immense becomes intimate. The viewer sits inches from what resembles light-years, examining the residual patterns that govern stellar birth.