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AEROPLASTICS CONTEMPORARY is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of work by New York artist Carrie Yamaoka with the gallery.
For the past eight years, Yamaoka has worked with reflective mylar, a plastic film coated with a reflective surface. The artist pours resin onto this reflective ground. Referring to this work as painting would be misleading; there are no painted images present. It is empty of content but full of incident. There are air bubbles and swooshes and blips which occur that are the result of process. We are faced with a bendable, pliable, inflected and obscured ‘mirror’ image. Sometimes the viewer is confronted with dizzying vortices of intense color. The works in this exhibition will range from small to large, taking a variety of forms and running a fine line between painting and sculpture: “koolpops” poured directly onto mylar, pieces mounted on wood panel looking like paintings, pieces encapsulated in a flexible rubber which hangs on the wall and sometimes extends down onto the floor and into the room.
In her own words: “You could say that the viewer becomes the subject. Or, that the viewer within the space in which the piece is being viewed, becomes the subject. The image arrived at, in any given moment, is contingent upon the viewer’s navigation through the space that the painting occupies and reflects. The picture is not static; it’s constantly shifting. The viewer makes and re-makes the picture(s) from the conditions that I’ve set up. I’m more interested in the way we see than in the things that are seen.”
Yamaoka’s work comes out of both a Minimalist and Pop lineage. In a review of her 2002 solo show at Debs & Co. in New York, Ken Johnson of The New York Times wrote: “In time-honored Modernist style (think Robert Ryman), Ms. Yamaoka also toys with the physical support, calling attention to the painting as a hand-made object. Freed of stretchers or underlying panels in most cases, the paintings have undulating surfaces on which you find yourself reflected as in funhouse mirrors. Some have edges fringed by plastic drips; some hang low and bend at the floor. It all adds up to a seductive marriage of voluptuous materialism and rigorous formalism.”
Yamaoka’s work was included in the recent exhibition “Mirror, Mirror” at MassMOCA in the U.S. This is her first solo exhibition in Europe. Forthcoming exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Studio 1.1 in London, and a solo exhibition at Debs & Co in New York, both in May 2004.
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