| Carrie Yamaoka 18 by 18 (blue#2) 2005 mylar, urethane resin and mixed media 18 x 18 inches Courtesy of the artist, New York City more works at Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels, Belgium Ephemera + multiples: Epoxy Resin Photo |
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| Carrie Yamaoka lives and works in New York City. She has had numerous solo shows including at Debs & Co., New York, and Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels. Her work has been included in exhibitions in the US and internationally, including at Artists Space, New York; the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art; Bard College; "Vanishing Point" at the Wexner Center, "Mirror, Mirror" at Mass MOCA, and in "Extreme Abstraction" at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. For nearly a decade, Yamaoka has made reflective and optically disturbing paintings of mylar encapsulated in resin. The artist pours resin onto a reflective ground that is empty of content but full of incident. Interiors, the figure in passing, as well as the elemental substances of air, sky, earth, and water serve alternately -- and simultaneously -- as subject and reflected object. Air bubbles, liquid sluices and other artifacts of production reveal a layered archaeology of process while forming loci for an otherwise shifting and fluid gaze. The mirrored surfaces of these works, which are usually made of resin on wood, range from nearly machine-made perfection to the random, bubbly roughness of fired glaze; from small to rather large; from silver to deep blue or green. Some hang on the wall like paintings; others are tucked in corners or on the floor. No two are alike. None are exactly as simple or as uniform as you first assume. Like Robert Ryman's work, Ms. Yamaoka's is a reverent dissection of the modernist monochrome, but she also partakes of a more parodistic approach, exemplified by Robert Rauschenberg's ''White Paintings'' from the early 1950's, in which the viewer's shadow becomes part of the work. Yet its seeming embrace of accident can be connected to the much older tradition of Japanese ceramics. However you parse them, her efforts intimate a rejuvenation of Minimalism, spurred by new materials, more refined techniques and fresh ideas. Roberta Smith, Carrie Yamaoka: 'World Hotel,' New York Times ART IN REVIEW, June 25, 2004: |
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