Carrie Yamaoka
Inside Out Upside Down
May 17—June 29, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, May 17, 6—8 pm
Carrie Yamaoka, 2176 square inches (fugitive) redux, 2022.
36 broken resin/mylar fragments (verso) wrenched from its original ground, a painting dated 1999.
Photographed in Yamaoka’s studio in 2023.
Ulterior Gallery proudly presents Inside Out Upside Down, Carrie Yamaoka’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, marking five years since her last solo exhibition in New York.
The artist draws from a history of working with photography and photographic ideas, embedded to varying degrees, in materials, processes and conceptual underpinnings. A thread of revisiting and returning to earlier works runs throughout this exhibition. Yamaoka peels, excavates, and reconfigures works from 5 or 10 or 25 years ago. Excavating to reveal the verso, the side previously hidden within the work, she unlocks a time capsule, revealing a palimpsest, adding new dimensions and expanding the work’s presence.
New works are built on the physical residue of earlier works. An earlier painting is destroyed and becomes a sculpture, a record of transformation and regeneration. A single work has been broken into 2 parts, and may be configured differently, from one site to the next. And there are also new works that push further methods and processes she has been developing. Yamaoka rubs up against and resists the idea of a work ever being finished, opening up questions around iteration, seriality, mastery, and endpoints. And if the viewer returns and sees the work on another day, at a different time, in different weather— how might what they see differ?
2176 square inches (fugitive) redux, 2022.
Installed in Seeing is forgetting and remembering and forgetting again at Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, in 2023.
At Ulterior, it will be reconfigured in a new iteration.
Carrie Yamaoka is a visual artist engaged with the topography of surfaces, materiality and process, the tactility of the barely visible and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object. Her work engages the viewer at the intersection between records of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture emerging in fleeting and unstable states of transformation. Their work has been featured in exhibitions at the ICA (Philadelphia), MOMA/PS1 (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Henry (Seattle), Artists Space (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Wexner (Columbus), Leslie Lohman Museum (New York), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Fondation Ricard (Paris), and MassMOCA. Writing about her work has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, The New Yorker, Time Out/NY, Hyperallergic, Interview and Bomb. Their work is included in the collections of the Buffalo AKG, Art Institute of Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, and Centre Pompidou. Yamaoka is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and an Anonymous Was A Woman award (2017). She is also a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy. Yamaoka lives and works in New York.
Press
Natalie Haddad, Carrie Yamaoka Thrives Between the Cracks. Hyperallergic, June 27, 2024.
