 Kyle Damari is a student at the Main College of Art, whose work explores interdependency of humans and the need to work and play together in order to live better lives. Brian Knoblock talked with Kyle about the ways in which individual perspectives work together to form a bigger picture. Kyle, talk about your work a little bit. What sort of inspires you? I come from a kind of community that was really that embraced the community value. So solidarity and unity are really crucial themes to the work that I make right now. You can kind of see these pieces here, they're using each other to hold themselves up, which is kind of a physical manifestation of unity, but also kind of talks conceptually about some things that we need to do as humans to better live. There's a perspective in your work about, as you just said, individual pieces sort of working together to build a whole. Talk a little bit about that. They have a really precarious way of standing on their own, and the use of multiples really helps them solidify a certain form. So my ability to kind of break down these forms and reinstall them using multiples kind of allows that to really manifest itself, it kind of becomes a more cohesive piece. Is their meaning in the shape and the forms themselves or only as they work together as part of a whole? That's a really good question. A lot of times, like in this case, these squares here, they're kind of, these are rooted in the fact that humans often have a certain frame or a certain perspective that they're kind of operating under, and in other case, the piece that you saw already, the triangles, they kind of work to create kind of a signifier. They emulated the contours of a landscape, so it depends on the piece. In some cases, they support one another, and in some cases, they support one another physically, in other cases, they support one another kind of conceptually. The piece that you have in the lobby has very large triangles, and then a series of very small ones, and what's the differences between those, what do they represent to you? The large triangles are, I kind of have really thought about the difference in scale, and the large triangles are there to kind of emulate the landscape, and the small triangles are there to kind of talk about the beings that inhabit that landscape, just like you would talk about kind of a place that you exist in the community that kind of embodies that space. A lot of your forms are very specific. They're very hard geometric figures, and they sort of have their own set of boundaries, but your sort of work is about being without boundaries and unity of a whole. Talk about that sort of contradiction. Yeah, it's really interesting. People kind of set up this kind of notion that they're othered, or there are others from their own, and those boundaries are only kind of constructs that separate, and I thought it would be really interesting if I could use those boundaries as a way to kind of create unification and create solidarity. Is the process of putting together an installation and building it part of the art as well, or does the art only come when it's all finished? Absolutely. That actually is interesting because I can talk about a community project that I'm doing with learning works over in the West End, that I'm currently having the students design their own shapes that they will then, it's kind of a community building exercise. So once they have their shapes kind of in this manifestation, they'll then take their shapes and build together, and the act of building, collaborating and co-creating kind of will create that sense of community with the people that I'm working with. So for you, art is a very relational experience, is that right? Absolutely. And I think in a lot of ways the structures, the sculptures themselves are a more physical and tangible way to kind of see that relational experience, but I really kind of dedicated and focused on the idea that kind of community based work and work with individuals that don't have necessarily art sensibilities, I'm really interested in getting them engaged with how they can work together and how they can make together. If people want more information about you and your work, where can they go? You can check me out at kyledemarie.com.