Kyle Holland
The Rake  

Media: Stenciled cotton rag and cotton beaten from Wrangler jeans, polymer varnish, and letterpress printing. 

Artist Statement:
This piece is a re-creation of a photograph, originally taken by a trail camera, of The Rake. According to urban legend, The Rake is said to be seen around the Northeastern United States and will attack humans, even if unprovoked. To be visited by The Rake is an omen of personal tragedy.

Through my own virtual hunting practice, I observe and gather text within the confines of online hunting forums with topics often clustered under rubrics such as “Do you ever get afraid in the woods?” Although these forums are undoubtedly trolled by judgmental hunters, they provide a space in which men feel comfortable sharing anonymous anecdotes of fearful experiences they have had while hunting. The process of reading posts on these forums allows me to enter a liminal, virtual space from which I emerge along with these other men, with whom I sympathize, as an aggregate, ambiguous identity. The text appropriated for this piece is composed of one such confession of fear and is limited to first-person, singular pronouns resulting in an authorial voice that is as much mine as it is the original contributor’s.

This text was incorporated along with the re-creation of the photograph that The Rake was captured in, however, as a sympathetic gesture toward these men who share their fears in the online communities of hunting forums, The Rake was omitted from the image to make the woods less of a fearful place.

A portion of the pulp used in the creation of this piece was beaten from Wrangler jeans which I associate with men who embody the archetype of hegemonic masculinity: a dominant, idealized man to which I, and the men who publicly post about their fears on hunting forums, fall victim to. Beating these articles of clothing into pulp and using it to construct a space from which frightening elements are removed is my subversive act against this social structure.

Biography

Kyle Holland is a visual artist who was born and raised in Memphis, TN where he earned his BFA in Printmaking from Memphis College of Art in 2012. He received his MFA in Book Arts + Printmaking at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA in 2019.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including noted shows at the Robert C. Williams Paper Museum in Atlanta, GA; The Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, OH;  å in New York City; Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN; and the King St. Stephen Museum in Hungary. His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nevada Museum of Art, The Center for å Arts in New York City, Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, and UC Berkeley among others. 

Holland currently lives and works in Tuscaloosa, AL where he continues his artistic practice in addition to teaching in the MFA Book Arts Program at The University of Alabama.