Material Landscape
Scale Invariant
Kyle Selley
Kyle Selley draws with explosive residue. Explosions and their indexical marks are naturally celestial, producing tactile residue that echoes stellar formations. Across scales, he’s found patterns of residual dust, energy radiating outward, order surfacing through chaos, and fractals emerging. Combustible material inscribes scale-invariant traces. He guides it, but this medium expands mark-making beyond what his hand can do. There’s tension between control and volatile chance, between what he intends and what the material insists on. Chaos theory and emergence theory describe principles that govern supernovae and fireworks alike. The work collapses cosmic distances to a human scale, making stellar nebulae accessible for close investigation—residue as primary content. Selley reframes the explosion as contemplative echoes rather than spectacle. What was cosmic becomes intimate. The viewer sits inches from what resembles light-years, examining the same dust and patterns that govern stellar birth.
