Feel Me (detail), 2018. Multi-media installation, with book manual, video, neon light, silver purse, readymade pink lacrosse balls, dimensions variable. Photo: James Hilton.

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In her multi-layered and interactive installation Feel Me, Kyla Kegler provides an array of tools intended to bring about bodily sensation. In a screen-filled, numbed-out world where our attention is all too often pulled away from the sensations we experience through our corporeal selves, Kegler asks us to inhabit our feeling bodies as a radical act of being present. With an instruction manual and video guide at the viewer’s disposal, Feel Me is meant to be touched, felt, stroked, pressed, and leaned against. While we sensuously explore our own selves as others around us do the same, Feel Me creates an intricate web of sensory affect in which we are all invited to dwell collectively.

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Kyla Kegler (b. 1985, Buffalo, NY) is a painter and performance artist whose work probes the phenomenon of haptic sensation through visual, audio, text, and performative experiences. Her research critically navigates the paradox of the mindfulness industry, to which she contributes as both an artist and as a practitioner. She facilitates finding feeling as a radical act of resisting apathy. 2018 received her MFA in visual art on full fellowship at the University at Buffalo. 2015 received MA in Solo / Dance/ Authorship at the Art University of Berlin. 2004 began her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on full scholarship and completed it at The Art Academy of Weissensee in Berlin Germany in 2010. 2006 Apprenticed at the Bread and Puppet farm, which heavily influenced the medium and principle of her early work. Lived in Berlin between 2009-2016, and there co-founded an experimental cabaret theater club, Zuhause, in 2010. 2013, received two NYSCA grants for community puppet theater on the West Side of Buffalo. Her research concentrates on sensually progressive methods for combating somatically alienating symptoms of daily business. She does this through cultivating intimacy and heightened awareness of physical sensation - to reattach people to their bodies, to foster embodied empathy.