Nando Alvarez-Perez, NADA New York, New York, NY, 2024

Booth

Location:
The Starrett-Lehigh Building
601 W 26th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001

Enter on 11th Avenue
Between 26th St. & 27th St.

VIP and Press Preview:
Wednesday, May 13, 10:00am–4:00pm

Public Hours:
Wednesday, May 13, 4:00–7:00pm
Thursday, May 14, 11:00am–7:00pm
Friday, May 15, 11:00am–7:00pm
Saturday, May 16, 11:00am–7:00pm
Sunday, May 17, 11:00am–5:00pm

For NADA New York 2026, we will exhibit a solo presentation of works by Buffalo-based artist Kyla Kegler (b.1985). Working across media - painting, sculpture, performance, and film - Kegler explores themes of fantasy, connection, pleasure, and purpose. Her practice is primarily informed by her work with the historic Bread and Puppet Theatre (2007), as well as acting as co-founder of the underground Zuhause theatre in Berlin (2010 - 2013). With this attention to performativity, Kegler approaches each body of work and its components with a filmic quality that dissolves traditional barriers of media. 

This presentation will include new painting and sculpture from her ongoing series The Accumulation of Meaning Over Time (all parts sold separately), which explores Kegler’s evolving relationship to utopia. Raised within the Waldorf education system, Kegler experienced a youth that encouraged play, exploration of raw materials, rhythm, and self-direction. And yet, as is common, she recalls childhood fantasies shaped not by organic forms of play, but by mythic objects that she wasn’t allowed to own - barbies, my little pony, and other shiny tools of capitalistic play. For Kegler, her lack of access influenced a desire for an imagined paradise where mainstream imagery promised safety, satisfaction, and belonging. As an adult, this quest for Utopia has shifted and instead hinges on a desire for interdependence, embodied community, and ingenuity - the principles that actually underscored her youth and education. 

Within the series, each painting is an exploration of atmospheric world-building, grounded by common visual forms of utopia - the circle, a rainbow, a mirage - and framed in custom laminated plywood. Each frame is sanded with soft, rounded edges - an ode to the Waldorf resistance to right angles, in favor of the philosophy that human development and nature are better reflected by living, dynamic shapes. Using interference paint, gouache, beeswax crayon and pastel, among other textural materials like coarse pumice, the surface evolves in changing light and in the body's proximity to the work. These evolutions are anchored by the Jungian idea that meaning is not immediate but accumulates over time, revealing itself when the psyche is ready to integrate it into their understanding of self. In her sculptural practice, Kegler creates large ceramic vessels that become grounds for the development of environments for miniature ceramic figurines and physical manifestation of utopic forms that continue an exploration of wholeness and the human search for purpose. 

At NADA, an installation of paintings and sculptural objects will be bisected by a translucent hand-dyed curtain that obscures and reveals a second layer of the installation. Curtains, as an architectural tool, factor heavily in Kegler’s installations becoming a metaphor for evolving/staged environments and the desire for containers throughout the evolution of self. 

SELECT WORKS

INSTALLATION VIEWS

About the Artist

Kyla Kegler (b.1985) explores themes of fantasy, relationship, pleasure, and purpose through painting, sculpture, performance, and film. Her films and performances often choreograph groups engaged in tasks that blend emotional and physical labor.

Kegler’s practice is informed by her work with Bread and Puppet Theater (Vermont) and her role as co-founder of the underground theater Zuhause (Berlin). She holds an MA in Solo/Dance/Authorship from the Art University of Berlin and an MFA in Studio Art from the University at Buffalo.

Her past projects include Feel Me, a multi-modal investigation of the mindfulness industry exhibited at Box Gallery, Canisius College, and Big Orbit; The House on Fire Show, a teen web-drama about the climate crisis screened at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art; Mountains, a puppet soap opera performed at Artpark, Torn Space Theater, and Undercurrent Gallery (Brooklyn); The Frontier, a performance about cults and community; and R.d.f.t.c. (Relationships don’t finish, they change), an installation of video and sculpture exhibited at the Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca College, NY (2024).

Her current project, The Accumulation of Meaning Over Time (All Parts Sold Separately), funded by the UB Humanities Communities of Care Grant, includes a film, ceramic objects, and paintings. It explores early life influences—such as Mattel toy commercials—on world-building as utopian fantasy and a strategy for control amid unmanageable chaos.

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