Cybele Lyle: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre unfolds as a meditation on place, memory, and the slow work of reconciliation with one’s own past. Presented from January 16 to February 28, 2026, the exhibition takes its title from the 1948 film that once shaped the artist’s expectations and disappointments alike. Lyle revisits this cinematic reference not as homage, but as a lens through which childhood longing, misinterpretation, and eventual understanding come into focus.
As a child relocated to Sierra Madre, California, Lyle experienced the town as remote and confining, far removed from the ease of her earlier life. The promise embedded in the film’s title suggested a hidden value, a sense of significance that might render the unfamiliar lovable. Yet the discovery that the story’s Sierra Madre belonged to Mexico, and not her own hillside town, created an early fracture between imagination and reality. This sense of dissonance—between what is named and what is lived—echoes throughout the exhibition.
Now based in Los Angeles, with physical and emotional distance from her childhood home, Lyle returns to these landscapes with renewed curiosity. The exhibition brings together three interconnected bodies of work that explore identity through fragmentation and reassembly. In the Boy Mounds self-portrait series, collaged images of iconic male figures are embedded into local terrains from the artist’s life, allowing the body to re-enter her practice as a vessel for memory, projection, and permission. These figures appear both present and unresolved, mirroring the complexities of self-formation.
The hanging textile works and floor collages extend this exploration through material and spatial shifts. Drawn from photographs, colors, and patterns associated with her childhood home and garden, these pieces break familiar imagery into abstracted forms. Textiles suspend fragments in midair, while ground-level collages anchor them back to the earth, suggesting a dialogue between instability and belonging.
Together, the works in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre hold space for contradiction. They acknowledge disappointment without dismissing affection, and propose the landscape as an active participant in shaping identity. Through re-framing and fragmentation, Lyle invites viewers to consider how home is not found intact, but continuously rebuilt over time.
Image: © Cybele Lyle
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