Kayla Mattes draws inspiration from digital meme culture to create handwoven narratives that offer humorous reflections on contemporary society and socio-political events. Developed during the pandemic, her Air Dancer series highlights the resilience, joy, and community people found through online meeting platforms like Zoom. These inflatable stick figures, called air dancers or tube men, are often placed outside car dealerships, on sports fields, or used as scarecrows in agriculture. In this series, the artist uses the air dancers as placeholders for people navigating a global health crisis. 

The air dancers’ static, plastered smiles contrast with their bodies’ erratic movements. Mattes compares this with the experience of socializing through Zoom during the pandemic. She explains, “they vacantly smile with their bodies contorting in and out of the frame, in front of backgrounds that may or may not be real. They are trying to stay positive, but their emptiness and neuroticism linger.” In Celebration (2021), she depicts a real-life gas station dance party that broke out in her neighborhood the day Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, turning collective exhaustion into a fleeting, joyful release within the frame of a Zoom meeting room.