Burn Patterns: A Solo Exhibition by Kyle Selley

Opening Reception: Friday September 26, 2025 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

4Most Gallery’s first show of the year by Kyle Selley, “Burn Patterns” opens Friday, September 26 from 6 – 8 p.m.! This exhibition will be open for viewing through Friday, October 3.

The cosmos speaks in explosions. From the Big Bang’s initial violence to stellar furnaces forging the elements of our bodies, creation emerges through destruction across unimaginable scales. My work brings these ancient processes within intimate reach.

Through controlled explosive encounters, I generate material evidence revealing how energy disperses according to universal principles. Each piece documents authentic destruction, leaving permanent testimony to split-second events that mirror cosmic creation’s violent beauty. The burn marks, chemical residues, and charred surfaces are authentic traces of the same physical laws governing stellar formation and galactic evolution. Small explosions naturally reference cosmic phenomena because both follow identical principles of gas expansion, matter scattering, and combustion.

This work operates within a fundamental paradox: individual marks remain unpredictable, yet overall patterns consistently echo cosmic imagery, demonstrating how chaos forms order at the system level. By controlling experimental conditions while surrendering to uncontrollable outcomes, I map the boundaries between artistic agency and material behavior. 

Standing before these intimate yet expansive records, viewers examine residual evidence connecting their material existence to the universe’s foundational processes. In confronting this residue, we recognize ourselves as participants in the ongoing explosive history that created everything we know.

We exist as witnesses to ancient violence that is beautiful. Every star, planet, and atom bears testimony to explosive fury, leaving us suspended within a universe of crystallized destruction. Through intimate examination of burn marks and chemical traces, my work offers a direct encounter with these same forces, compressed from cosmic scales into immediate human reach. Viewers discover themselves as living participants in an ongoing, explosive legacy, matter contemplating the beautiful yet violent origins of its own existence.