Kyle Meyer’s Interwoven begins with a portrait and then dismantles it. A sitter wears a traditional head wrap made from vividly colored cloth; Meyer photographs that encounter, produces a large-scale print, and then hand-shreds the print together with the fabric. The strips are woven into a three-dimensional, patterned work. What results is neither photograph nor textile exactly, but a surface that both presents and shields the person within it. Each work takes days, sometimes weeks, to complete.
The political charge of the series is inseparable from its craft. Meyer’s subjects are members of Eswatini’s LGBTQ community, where queerness is marginalized and concealment can be a condition of survival. The tension between the necessity of hiding for basic survival and the desire to express oneself openly informs both the subject and the means of fabrication. The cloth screen protects identity while the woven structure preserves individuality; the portrait survives as an index of a specific person even as that person recedes into pattern.
In book form, that doubled condition becomes unusually legible. Published by Radius Books as Meyer’s debut monograph, the volume presents the Interwoven series across 192 pages, with a foreword by Todd J. Tubutis and an interview by Andy Campbell that extend the conversation beyond the works themselves. The book is co-published with Yossi Milo. Meyer has worked between Eswatini and New York City since 2009, and that movement between places informs the project’s central question of how a body navigates visibility and erasure.
For collectors, the book’s significance lies in how directly its physical form argues its subject. A unique piece of fabric torn from the remnants of the Interwoven project accompanies each copy as a bookmark, so the reader handles the raw material of the series. Nothing about scarcity or market history needs to be claimed; the object itself makes the case that Meyer is thinking in three dimensions, and that the page is one more place where a portrait can be woven, torn, and remade.
