A handwritten note on lined paper, featuring colorful text and a simple drawing of a red flower. The message expresses feelings of boredom and confusion about a relationship, asking for advice on romantic interests. Phrases are highlighted in pink and blue, with some words written in green and yellow. The note concludes with the phrase "nice flower hey!" below the drawing. The overall tone is informal and emotional.

Kyla Mallett, Hello!!!, 2004. LightJet print. SFU Art Collection. Gift of Coleen and Howard Nemtin, 2024.

Rachel Topham Photography
A handwritten note on lined paper, featuring colorful text and a simple drawing of a red flower. The message expresses feelings of boredom and confusion about a relationship, asking for advice on romantic interests. Phrases are highlighted in pink and blue, with some words written in green and yellow. The note concludes with the phrase "nice flower hey!" below the drawing. The overall tone is informal and emotional.
A circular text design features handwritten messages in various colors, primarily blue and pink, swirling inward. The text expresses thoughts and feelings from one person to another, with phrases and words appearing in a spiral pattern. At the bottom, "Your Pal Alicia + Jun" is written in larger letters. The background is a soft, light hue, enhancing the colorful text. The artwork is framed in a simple white frame.

Title

Hello!!!

Artist

Kyla Mallett

Year

2004

Collection

SFU Art Collection

Year Acquired

2024

Hello!!! and Your Pal Alicia are part of Kyla Mallett’s 2004 series "Notes," which explores adolescent girl culture through medium-format photographs of schoolgirls’ notes. Mallett’s focus was on the covert communication within these social networks, highlighting the complex and often-trivialised experiences of girlhood. By enlarging and monumentalizing the seemingly minor act of note-passing, Mallett elevates it as a valid form of cultural expression, addressing themes of discontent, defiance, and the hidden emotional worlds of teenage girls. Through this series, Mallett critiques the surface-level perception of "cute" teenage communication, revealing the deeper currents of cruelty, defiance, and subversion. Drawing from conceptual art practices, Mallett’s formal approach captures the tension between the logical and the emotional, treating these anonymous, unsigned notes as significant artifacts of youth culture. "Notes" was part of Mallett’s MFA thesis at the University of British Columbia and reflects her ongoing exploration of communication, gossip, and alternative modes of knowledge production. 

Artists

Kyla Mallett completed her MFA at UBC in 2004 following her BFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2000. Her lens and media-based work consistently deals with the intersection of language and the social realm, utilizing pseudo-anthropological strategies of research, collecting and archiving. She has often focused on transgressive activities in such cultural arenas as adolescence, girlhood, feminism, academia and art, using interview/statistical research, installation, photography, sound and video. Alongside Notes, Mallett has made video work about girl bullying, a sound installation about gossip, a public art project and series on marginalia in library books, and a series of spirit photographs investigating an art gallery haunting. These works, along with more recent projects on Parapsychology and Self-Help materials, all demonstrate Mallett’s focus on marginal and devalued forms of language and communication. Mallett has received critical attention for her national and international exhibitions over the past fifteen years, and has presented work at such institutions as the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Alberta, Presentation House Gallery, Artspeak, ThreeWalls in Chicago, Mount St. Vincent University Gallery in Halifax, Chicago’s Paris London Hong Kong Gallery, Malaspina Printmakers, Vancouver, and Mercer Union in Toronto. Mallett is Dean, Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.