About

Cybele Lyle is a contemporary artist who explores the relationships between public, private, and ecological spaces. Her first solo museum exhibition, Floating Seeds Make Deep Forms, is a site-specific installation that responds to deserts in the North American Southwest as non-places—liminal expanses for ambiguity within a regenerative ecosystem. Incorporating aspects of queer space, Lyle’s multidimensional collage of desert photography, prints, drawings, makeshift structures, and video projections create a fluid backdrop for discovery. The installation inverts interior and exterior, man-made and biological structures, to contemplate the impression we leave on our surrounding environments. Informed by her upbringing in a family of educators—her father was a landscape architect, and her mother was a biologist—that shared a passion for desert ecologies, Lyle’s practice explores the correlation between architecture and nature through her perspective as a queer woman in order to accommodate that which exists outside of binary categorization. While architecture aims to define space, Lyle’s notion of architecture is non-limiting and responsive to the constantly evolving nature of identity and environment. The artist’s site-specific installation invites visitors to engage with the desert as a site of transformative potential. 

Organized by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Lauren R. O’Connell, curator of contemporary art. Support provided by World Class Partner The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. This artwork is commissioned following W.A.G.E. guidelines.