Brooklyn-based artist Cyle Warner never met his great grandfather, who started moving their family from Trinidad to Brooklyn in 1962. Warner interweaves photography with textiles in his debut exhibition “Weh Dem? De Sparrow Catcher?” at Welancora Gallery in Bed-Stuy. Some works cascade from empty frames in draped fabrics of diverse textures, like gruff burlap and linen with flower appliqués, even the iridescent polyester of a curtain, grommets intact. Warner sources materials from his family’s archive of textiles, sometimes recycling previous artworks. In other instances the works are smaller, more densely woven. Interspersed throughout are photos from Warner’s family history, printed on jacquard his godmother offered.
Abstraction, specifically across Warner’s manipulated photos, obscures his family members’ identities—and enables the work to commingle personal and universal experience. The exhibition’s wistful aura blurs convictions of a consensual past, posing endless alternative timelines, tapestries of possibility. Family histories are subjective; the same tale can vary between aunts and grandkids. Channeled through the concrete relics of Warner’s lineage, with the fabric and photos’ organic metadata of creases and dust the artist hasn’t cleaned off, these archetypal emotions gain novel vibrancy.
