About Face

Lyle XOX takes self-portraiture to an outrageous level of cheeky glam.

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In the world of high fashion, glamour magazines and total outrageousness, he’s known as Lyle XOX, the XOX a stand-in for the word “love.” But to the farmers of Wymark, a hamlet near Swift Current in southwest Saskatchewan, he is Lyle Reimer, the boy who didn’t fit in. 

“I always felt like an alien,” the Vancouver-based Lyle says of his prairie childhood.

His schoolmates played hockey. Young Lyle rode around town on a unicycle. Even before primary school, he was designing costumes. He was into crafts, and liked using recycled materials. He was ridiculed and misunderstood. 

Lyle XOX and Lyle Reimer are to become one later this year at the Art Gallery of Swift Current with the exhibition, Head of Design, a collection of 21 photographs of otherworldly creations in which Lyle’s shoulders serve as the plinth for a face and head layered with make-up, wigs and a bizarre assortment of recycled bric-a-brac. 

The results are fantasy characters surely found only in fairy tales, science fiction or childhood dreams. Pleasant dreams, not nightmares, because these androgynous “living sculptures” are never scary. Rather, they are surprisingly approachable, with a sly sense of humour and loads of irony. The exhibition also includes a video of Lyle in costume and displays of the materials he uses for his creations.

Lyle says he initially thought of refusing the invitation from the Swift Current gallery for an expanded version of a show that was to be seen this spring at Kostuik Gallery in Vancouver. The corona virus forced the postponement of the Vancouver show to a date not yet announced and the Swift Current iteration, delayed from a May opening, is now scheduled to run from Nov. 14 to Dec. 30.

Lyle eventually decided to go home again and accepted the Swift Current invitation. “I thought this is a time to reclaim a part of myself,” Lyle said in a recent interview. “I see it as a big moment and I’m excited about it.”

Lyle will not just be arriving as a boy from Wymark. He will be riding a wave of cheeky fabulousness as the darling of Vogue magazine, creator of the 2019 art book Lyle XOX: Head of Design, social media sensation with 150,000 Instagram followers, and the subject of a 44-minute CBC documentary, Random is My Favourite Colour.

Kim Houghtaling, director of the Swift Current gallery, understands Lyle’s emotions: “I feel Lyle wants to show his work here because of his experiences with disconnection from his communities here, and maybe a need to express himself loud and clear in a place where he, his self, was kept quiet as a child.”

People may think they have Lyle all figured out. Surely, he is a wild clubbing partier. Actually, he is more of a stay-at-home guy whose idea of a fun night is to invite friends over for dinner. His thrills come from finding beauty in the ordinary household objects most of us overlook.

And no, Lyle’s creations are not all manifestations of himself. Lyle says he simply wants to create objects of beauty and wonder. Think of an actor who can convincingly play roles totally different from his own personality.

“It’s not like these characters are inside of my head and they’re trying to come out,” says Lyle. 

Indeed, he does not plan things out in advance. Instead, he sets out various objects that could potentially be employed – things like turkey bones, plastic utensils, coat hangers, cereal boxes and fabric swatches. Think of Brian Jungen’s repurposed running shoes or lawn chairs. Each object alone is unimpressive. Rearranged and combined in unique ways, they are art.

For Lyle, the make-up comes first, and sometimes a wig or other headpiece. Then he spontaneously applies recycled objects to his face and head. He says he's not even aware what his hands are doing and likens the process to “an out-of-body experience.”

Lyle began experimenting with “living sculptures” in 2013 after more than a decade in the fashion and cosmetics industry, by bringing together all his interests – art, make-up, recycling and fashion.

Houghtaling views Lyle’s creations through the lens of art history, starting with the portrait bust, “a clean, close-up look at a person’s face, their identifying features down to their upper shoulders.”

There were also head-and-shoulders oil paintings and later photographic portraits designed to show subjects in what Houghtaling calls an “ideal” way. Now, of course, we have selfies.

“Lyle XOX is using the portrait bust tradition, the model portrait bust and the self-portrait selfie, as known modes of expression of identity or symbolic identity – the expression of the self, the ideal self or iconic identity. He then combines this with meaningful or symbolic constructed elements into a highly expressive force.”

To best appreciate Lyle’s work, read the backstories accompanying each image in his coffee-table book, Lyle XOX: Head of Design, which includes 62 large colour plates of his creations. Each is twinned with a short written fantasy.

Consider Crackpot. In the photograph, Lyle sports shards of a broken white coffee pot on his head and face, which has been painted in a rainbow of colours. On first glance, the shards resemble chunks of ivory or precious stones adorning a celestial visitor.

The campy backstory is more earthly: “Flavia Obaltine’s latest artistic endeavour was comprised of two parts performance art and one part casserole cook-off; some art critics equated it to a recipe for a ground-breaking gallery exhibition. Obaltine’s work had onlookers both amazed and feeling borderline uncomfortable as the climax of the art piece was Flavia violently smashing CorningWare onto a box spring mattress and writhing in a variety of imported cheese, breadcrumbs and heavy cream.”

So, Flavia is not really a Martian. Instead, Crackpot is a magical work of artful mischief. It leaves us smiling and full of wonder for the small-town alien who turned recycling into big-city glam. ■ 

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