Kayde Anobile is interested in provoking questions about identity and the other. Her starting point is often twins, doppelgängers, pairs and paradoxes: “The concept of a doppelgänger or double encapsulates the mutability of identity by presenting the uncanny possibility that there could be another ‘you’ in existence".
Anobile strives in her work, to explore and inhabit an in-between space that is also a deliberately uncanny space. Her use of creatures such as the Yeti, which are possibly mythical or legendary, is a way of testing the boundaries of uncanny ‘otherness’. Her installations draw on ideas of illusion and of creating illusory spaces with the simplest of methods, principally through light and mirrors. She cites the Victorian fascination with freaks and freak shows presented in circuses and carnivals as her source.
Kayde Anobile searches for Victorian and Edwardian photographs and uses them as the basis for drawn portraits. Her interpretation of the images accentuate, or tease out a certain ambiguity regarding gender and sexuality. A sense that these individuals are hovering in time and space is accentuated by the surrounding darkness and suggestion of burn marks. She is intrigued by paradoxical outcomes and the cognitive dissonance caused by presenting contradictory ideas simultaneously. The distinction between mechanical reproduction and hand-drawn images, for instance, is blurred and questioned in her practice of ‘reproducing’ drawings.
Kayde Anobile studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and exhibited in Chicago and New York before her move to the UK. She completed an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2010. Simulacrum, her solo show at Tintype, was in March/April 2011. Anobile's work was also presented in The Nature of Change: Hybridity and Mutation, a group show at HRL Contemporary. Her work is in the Zabludowicz Collection.
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