Carrie Yamaoka: recto/verso explores the recurring themes of visibility, perception, and subjectivity across Yamaoka’s work from the early 1990s through today. It brings together her text-based explorations and chemically altered photographs centered on erasure and double meanings with her process-oriented works in reflective polyester film and resin. Conceived with the artist, the layout of the exhibition draws connections across Yamaoka’s cumulative body of work and underscores the iterative and synchronous nature of her practice over the last thirty years.

Among the earliest works in the exhibition is Archipelagoes (1991–1994/2019), a group of chemically altered photograms that refer to sites of quarantine and detention such as prisons, internment camps, and hospitals; as well as the series Banned (1990–1993), in which Yamaoka photographed pages from books banned in the United States (either from import or libraries) and, using subtractive processes, altered and redacted the text to align with her subjective reading of these renegade and canonical works. These artworks from the early 1990s can be seen in relation to their time and its crucible of identity politics, the instability of language and representation, and the AIDS epidemic—and they poignantly continue to resonate today.

In the mid-1990s, Yamaoka began using reflective polyester film, creating works that occupy a hybrid zone between painting, drawing, and sculpture. In this malleable material, Yamaoka found a corollary to photographic film: the reflective membrane captures shifting environmental conditions and, in Yamaoka’s words, functions like “a film plane upon which the shutter is always open.” These works implicate time as a material and accentuate the ephemeral nature of being, as well as the potential for multiplicity and mutability. The viewer enters the frame, reflected in the work, positing and navigating their authorship and agency.

Across her work, Yamaoka revels in materiality and deploys strategies that mirror a conception of the self and identity that is contingent and elastic. Her working methods embrace the incidence of chance, states of transformation, and the indeterminate. Taking heed of error and defect, she often uses materials unconventionally to expand their potential beyond their pre-determined, scripted function.

Yamaoka (U.S., born 1957) has exhibited her work since the 1980s. recto/verso celebrates her first solo museum presentation at a time when visibility and representation are of renewed significance. Yamaoka is the recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2017 Anonymous Was a Woman Award. She lives and works in New York City and is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition is a take-away broadside by fierce pussy titled Transmission IV, the fourth iteration of a text-based work conceived as a communiqué from the future to the beings of the present.

A full-color exhibition catalog is available online and at the front desk.

Follow this link to hear Carrie Yamaoka in conversation with her collaborator and longtime partner, fellow artist Joy Episalla, and Henry Associate Curator Nina Bozicnik.