Kyle Hittmeier

Kyle Hittmeier (American b. 1983) is a multi-media artist, curator and designer who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He teaches in the Painting department at the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Art department at Lehman College.

AB NY Gallery is excited to show his painting series, ‘Flora of the Cayman Islands’,

In 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism released the Panama Papers, followed by the Pandora Papers in 2021. These two releases were the largest ever collaborative, journalistic pursuits that uncovered the clandestine networks of offshore tax havens, where it is now estimated 15% of the world's wealth is concealed. These havens are built through an elaborate, opaque system involving ghost shareholders, impossible paper trails, and exploited regional actors.

The painting series, ‘Flora of the Cayman Islands’, which takes its title from a George R. Proctor flora field guide, aestheticizes and builds a design language for hidden tax haven empires. These paintings contrast tourist images of the Caymans against a rendered network of Post-It note compositions. Post-It notes are simple, utilitarian objects that can hold everything from the mundane doodle, to the ultra-secret password. They are the few remaining, physical objects in a digitally evolved, financial world. Botanical motifs have been used by civilizations throughout history as a means to symbolize their wealth and prosperity. Prominent in the surfaces of these notes are hints of flora fragments —attempts of tax-haven design that compare Cayman indigenous plant phytotomies with various banking and information structures. The displayed synthetic hybrids are created through a digitally generated and physically exported process, namely solvent transferring or pen-plotter drawing. In choosing mechanized processes for these motifs, I am seeking to de-romanticize the colonial histories of botanical illustration, especially in its tethered history to specimen 'discovery' and 'collection' from native lands.

The title of this series serves as a metonym for a larger, international affair. It is an ongoing project that addresses long-standing colonial exploitation, from early Royal Society scientific expeditions, to current day tourist privatization and tax haven ventures.