Killer Cuties with
Sean-Kierre Lyons

The New York–Based Multidisciplinary Artist on Making Art at the End of the World

Interview: Jasmine Sanders
Photography: Neva Wireko

The scholar and theorist Sianne Ngai posits that an attraction or predilection for cuteness is an eroticization of powerlessness, preference for the small, pitiful, injured or vulnerable to injury affirming the desiring subject’s power and dominance. Cuteness is signified sensuously—by visual, statural smallness, by the squishy, round, and fuzzily textured. As with all endearment, it is an innately narcissistic endeavor: Peer into those wide, wet pupils and discover your own visage reflected back.

The objets dreamed up by New York–based multidisciplinary artist Sean-Kierre Lyons exude a sort of deranged cuteness: inhabitants of an off-kilter, parallel world of psychedelic combatants and centennial death rituals. Their handmade figures, called “flower warriors,” are plush and psychopathic, emoji-like and armed. Lyons’s progression from color pencil drawings—debuted at a 2020 Fortnight Institute show titled In Battle Petals Fall—to 3D characters imbues the flower populace with a sense of evolution, their progression from Bristol paper to the earthly realm evidence of cognition independent of their maker.

Salinas, California-born, and Brooklyn raised, Lyons's work has been exhibited at NADA Miami, Larrie, and Housing Works. They are enthusiastically collaborative, evident in their contribution to the SS21 campaign of New York–based fashion designer Collina Strada, aptly titled “Change Is Cute.” In the show, Lyons’s minstrel-esque, animated de fleurs strut and peacock alongside the other models, dancing ballet, doing the pas de chat across the screen. Their figures separate and recombine, undulating to tunes by the artist Angel Emoji.

The studio that Lyons shares with their housemate and frequent coconspirator Precious Okoyomon is strewn with the disembodied bits of flower people and the saltine crackers, resin, and wood scraps which comprise Lyons’s Cracker Flags series, the first of which was painted with the symbols of the confederacy. Imminent iterations include an interpretation of the flags of Great Britain and Blue Lives Matter. “I’ve definitely learned a lot and corrected the process since that last one,” says Lyons. In our conversation below, we speak about the end of the world, humor as a coping strategy, the subjectivities of miniature poodles, and the Frankeinsteinian thread subtending Lyons’s work.

Jasmine Sanders

Sean-Kierre Lyons

I realized that we’ve met on a few separate occasions at events for mutual friends. In considering the aesthetics of cuteness and the thematics of your work, I kept thinking about your dog.

Pulpouri!

Yes, Pulpouri, a very small but spirited miniature poodle. I remember you saying that he was kind of a miscreant.

Yeah, he does his own thing, He doesn’t listen. He’s bad, that’s what I'd say.

I thought this a useful entrepôt to thinking about the figures you’ve created. These adorably conceived, minute objects which have arrived at the other side of cuteness and taken on a life of their own, which is autonomy and violence.

Part of the reason I make them that way is because I think when people encounter something that looks cute and appealing—babyish—they’re not going to feel threatened by it in a context related to violence. You may feel threatened because you're insecure but you're not going to jump. My grandfather told me when he was in Vietnam, he was trying to give a bunch of kids some candy and they jumped him and stabbed him. I was really young but it stuck with me. I really didn't feel my power when I was younger. My grandfather told me that kids are the most powerful: they have minds of their own. So it is similar to what you said about Pulpouri. When someone exists in a state of cuteness you aren’t expecting an attack. I also think that humor is adjacent to cuteness, which I also utilize. This is a way for me to let off some violence without being direct.

The flowers are part of this entire world that I’m building called “The Black Flower Forest,” which is actually a planet. They're a small part of that world. What they represent is that their world, much like ours, is on the brink of ending. It’s a way of conceptualizing our world’s impending doom, but seeing it through this storybook lens is much more comfortable than seeing it straight on. Last year when we thought the world was going to end I was like, damn, I gotta deal with this shit.

It is fascinating to hear you say that within the chimerical flower realm, death is as essential as the creation of new life.

In their world, they were kind of in harmony. They’re at this ceremony that they have every 100 years. It’s where older flowers go to die. They jump in a well, committing suicide. But it’s a beautiful thing. They kill themselves and new flowers are born; death makes way for new life via reincarnation. This foreign entity—a wasp—comes in and tries to kill them, so out of nowhere they’re forced into war. Then it breaks off into different stories, which I will continue to expound upon.

Intrinsic to the current moment is the manner in which we are robbed, not only of the right to live well or with dignity, but of the right to die with dignity as well.

I wish that death could be a more celebrated thing. I’ve only been to a few funerals that aren't depressing or draining, so I wanted to depict my belief that death is beautiful.

Artwork Featured In This Image (Left to Right): Sean-Kierre Lyons, The Fire Starter, 2021, Saltines, resin, acrylic, wooden box frame, 24 x 36 inches. Sean-Kierre Lyons, A Smack in the Face, 2021, Saltines, resin, acrylic, wooden box frame, 24 x 36 inches. Sean-Kierre Lyons, Nobody Tryna do Alllllaattt, 2021, Saltines, resin, acrylic, wooden box frame, 24 x 36 inches.

Your characters appear almost deranged to me, in regards to their own intense emotional lives, which seem to be undergoing some sort of cataclysm. It feels indicative of some sort of terror experienced by you.

When I was going through the pandemic and dealing with so much death, I had to find a way to deal with this shit. With them, there’s an in-between doing the faces: If they’re really happy, they look kind of deranged. I'm glad you picked up on it because so many people are like, “They look so happy.” I want people to recognize that they’re spiraling, they’re at war. I think there's a disconnect because they are dressed so nicely—they’re kind of peacocking. They look nice, but they aren’t having a good time.

In another interview, you mentioned your fixation with animation and animatronics with regard to the cartoon’s historical roots in minstrelsy—its descent from racial caricature. There’s cartoon animation, but also reanimation typified in the nightmarish reanimated corpse. Frankenstein’s monster—coded as Black with his degraded, gargantuan physiognomy, limited intellect, and his fatal violations against chaste, white femininity—was not quite living, but rather undead. Is there something applicable in this, or am I reaching?

I am wielding consciousness in this way that I think about a lot. Sometimes there's this weird god complex. Like I've made something. So many of them are modeled after people I know and see, someone I love. I draw a lot of my friends, a lot of people I don't know. I am very rational, so I check in a lot. It is perverse to me.

With the cracker flag, called Drop in Water, and cracker existing as the closest thing to a white racial slur, the flag’s trajectory seems to perfectly encapsulate the absurdity of the idea of a white slur. Ultimately this is something very flimsy—easily broken down, crumbled, eaten by rats. Tell me about your relation to the cracker’s impermanence?

It makes so much sense. I remember when I thought of it, I googled it because I was like, somebody has done this, but they hadn't. I love more than anything that moment when Black people view it and they start laughing. Seeing their engagement with it felt like this full circle thing.

Humor defangs this thing, takes the bite out of it. This is why Black people are so funny.

Exactly, it's why Black people are hilarious. It’s the trauma baby! [laughs]