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 over a decade, Yamaoka has made paintings of reflective mylar encapsulated in resin. The artist works with a reflective ground that is empty of content but full of incident. The site in which the work is situated, the passing viewer, the ambient light in the room, 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.
"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."
(From: Roberta Smith, Carrie Yamaoka: 'World Hotel,' New York Times ART IN REVIEW, June 25, 2004) |
