Kyle Staver’s circus arrived in Tribeca as a high-wire act of the psyche: all of it—the painted ghosts and the clay bodies alike—conjured within the short and long span of a single year: 2025. At Nino Mier, the walls offered a rhythmic, fifty-fifty split: oil paintings like Swan Lake and Zebra Show in cheerful counterpoint with boisterous clay reliefs like Flyers and Lion’s Mouth. This arrangement presented a literalized paradox: the body versus the image, running parallel in public, at once a spatial representation and an allegorical proposition. These reliefs embody the grit, the honest and tactile labor of carving a narrative out of the mud. Then come the paintings: those ethereal acrobats and cinematic ghosts that transform Staver’s heavy clay bodies into luminous visions. At this point, the gallery recedes—and what remains is purely imagined. A dialectic of perpetual motion unfolds, where the physical sweat of the studio meets the ghostly glow of the screen. Here painted sceneries and their clay fragments become a high-stakes gamble—a balancing act as delicate as that of any circus performer.
