Alex Lyle

Alexander G. Lyle IV – does his best to avoid classification.  At the age of 15 he became a residency student with the North Start Ballet in Fairbanks, Alaska, a choice that would blossom into a ten year career as a dancer working in styles as disparate as classical ballet, modern, Butoh, and Kathak dance drama, performing in venues ranging from the Metropolitan Opera House to The National Center for The Performing Arts in Mumbai, India, the Roman Forum, and various dusty third world streets.  He also is a graduate of New York University with degrees in Dance and South Asia Sutdies.  In 2004 Alexander apprenticed under Master Stone Sculptor Devraj in Mahabalipuram, India.  In 2006 Alexander transitioned out of dance to focus on performance art and Installation while also developing a career in film as an art director.  In 2010 he performed at the MoMA in “The Artist is Present” the three month retrospective of performance artist Marina Abramovic during which he performed roughly 140 hours of the work “Point of Contact” among others. Also in 2010 Alexander collaborated with Brazilian artist Bob N. on a installation/performance for the Sao Paulo Biennial.  In 2011 he was a featured artist in residence at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center.  In 2013 Alexander had his first solo exhibition in New York with the installation and performance work “The Shape of Time”.  Having recently acquired a studio and exhibition space in Brooklyn, NY Alexander is looking forward to presenting more of his work and that of others.

Artist Statement:
I began my creative career as a dancer, using my body and its relationship to space, movement, time and others to explore the boundaries between subtle consciousness and the physical experience.  Over time my medium of exploration has grown from traditional dance forms to include performance art, sculpture, film, photo, and the written word.   Through these various mediums I have delved into our perception the 4th dimension: time.
In performance, sculpture, and video the 4th dimension helps me to understand how we inhabit the 3rd, our perceptual, dimension.
In my work (performance, sculpture, and video)I find myself continually returning to movement; change, growth, and decay are all forms of motion made possible by the 4th dimension.   Concepts of event and simultaneity further allow me to investigate how we share our experience of both the 3rd and 4th dimensions.  At times these explorations appear literal as in duration-based performance works, at other times more abstract – such as a physical object that is a reaction to, or a direct product of, a 4th dimensional perception.
The goal of all this is to use creativity to dig into the difficult to describe and bordering on impossible to quantify human experience of time and the present.  As I see it to begin to understand time and ones relationship to it is to begin to answer some of our most enduring questions: where we come from, and what is right NOW.  Questions so fundamental that they side-step all cultural boundaries and appeal directly to humanity at large.  Here science becomes human and art informative.
Nadi’s Breath: Stories from the River’s mouth

“Nadi’s Breath” presents a collection of physical art works made in collaboration with an unnamed river mouth in the town of Ashvem, Goa India.  Collaboration because each of the images and performances in this collection are a mixture of my own body’s history and the history of the river itself.  I speak here of history not as a linear tale laid out in paragraph, phrase, thought, or language but as the unspoken unremarked changes inherent in the passage of time.  As I breathe the minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades of my life come and go much as the tide silently marks the the life of the river mouth.
I am honored to have this opportunity to build a relationship with this surprising and beautiful piece of our world.  I can only hope that this work will draw others to find their own connection and inspiration in nature.