All That We Can Take | Exhibition Essay
By Liz Toohey-Weise
In July of 2025, I travelled with Kyle 1300 kilometers on paved roads and an additional 1000 kilometers on dirt roads. We drove up Vancouver Island, caught a ferry 10 hours north to Bella Coola, drove east through the Chilcotin Plateau, and ended in the small gold mining town of Wells, BC. The work in All That We Can Take documents that trip through Kyle’s immediately recognizable blend of painterly imagination and bare witnessing.
The paintings layer depictions of what is to happen over what is happening, invoking a world as it’s coming into existence. In this world, birds flock with helicopters, a human fishes in a river alongside infinite bears and salmon, and fires creep ever closer from the distant peripheries of landscapes. I can’t help but notice how many of the paintings in this exhibition have wildfire in them. The fires proliferating across Canada are spreading just as virulently across our shared psychological space, of which Kyle’s paintings stand as exemplars.
In the paintings, humans and animals trade roles as witnesses and casualties in the unfolding climate crisis. Kyle’s work never depicts burning humans – the closest we get is a burning cabin on stilts in the middle of a waterfall. This painting is much less upsetting than depictions in other paintings: of burning Steller’s jays fleeing a forest fire, or bears falling out of an old growth tree that is being extracted from the landscape by a helicopter. These images present themselves as metaphors for how anthropogenic climate change is affecting both the non-human and the human world.
And yet, any wildfire fighter or logger will tell you stories that are not so far off from these violent metaphors. I was told once about a rabbit fleeing through the holding line of a fire crew while burning to death, in a frenzy trying to put out the flames on its back and spreading the fire as it ran through tall grass. I heard another story about a bear sliced in half by a feller buncher as it was hibernating in the base of an old growth tree. And heli logging, no matter how absurd and confounding, is a real practice. Kyle’s paintings ask us to fully feel the sorrow and remorse of what we are doing to beings who have contributed nothing to the catastrophe they’re trapped in with us.
Kyle’s work is built of twinned repetitions, both in the formal aspects of the work and in the entities depicted. Countless tiny similar marks make up a waterfall, a star-filled night sky, a dense forest. Amidst this, a gathering of bears and deer stand vigil in front of a tree flagged for logging, swarms of waterbombers attempt to douse raging fires, and clearcuts multiply across the vast forested landscape. The inexhaustible energy of Kyle’s repetition of marks and figures speaks of obsession: look, look, look, look. He confronts us over and over again, from every imaginable angle, with the world we’re still refusing to see and hear and know.
Kyle has dedicated himself to travelling to the distant landscapes where the changes he depicts are in full brutal swing, and bringing back the messages he receives there to viewers in the gallery. Not only messages, but the actual landscape finds its way into his paintings. He has ground fireweed, a burnt deer bone I found on the ground and handed to him, and ashes from charred trees into his pigments, symbolically but also directly collapsing the distance between the white-walled gallery in a major city and these wilderness spaces mired in transformation.
These loaded reminders stand in curious juxtaposition with all the ways Kyle’s work is pleasing to the eye. The intricate line work, the vibrant colours, and the elaborate narratives entrance and engage us, even while the messages are something we’re still straining to hear. Amongst the many forms of advocacy and protection work undertaken without any promise or certainty of a collective livable outcome, Kyle’s paintings speak to us, in their beauty, of the artist’s unique capacity to hold us long enough in the space of contemplation that we might imagine, and then take steps to move forward into a different future.
