SEATTLE, WA—The Henry Art Gallery is pleased to announce the museum’s 2021 exhibitions, with the first set of exhibitions opening to the public on March 6. Admission to the Henry will be free through June 2021.
Among the works included in the exhibition are Yamaoka’s early, chemically altered photographs and text-based explorations centered on processes of erasure and double entendre. In the series
Banned (1990-1991), Yamaoka photographed pages from books banned in the U.S. (either from import or libraries) and, using subtractive processes, altered and redacted the text to align more with her subjective reading of these renegade and canonical works. In another of her artworks,
Archipelagoes (1991-1994), the artist created photograms that refer to sites of quarantine and detention such as prisons, hospitals, and internment camps. For the exhibition, Yamaoka is updating
Archipelagoes, adding the names of current immigrant detention facilities veiled by pastoral landscape references. These works emerged out of and have been informed by the crucible of identity politics, post-Stonewall LGBT activism, and the AIDS epidemic.
In the early 1990s, Yamaoka’s interest in language included the mirroring structure of palindromes, which led the artist to the material of mirrored glass, and soon thereafter to reflective mylar. In this flexible material, Yamaoka found a corollary for photographic film and began making works that occupy a hybrid zone between painting, drawing, and sculpture. Yamaoka’s working methods embrace chance occurrence, as well as error and defects, and include actions such as abrasion and folding. The exhibition features a range of Yamaoka’s work with mylar, from wall rubbings to cast resin pieces.
Across her iterative practice, Yamaoka revels in materiality, embracing states of transformation and the indeterminate. The reflective quality of the mylar captures shifting environmental conditions and, in Yamaoka’s words, functions like “a film plane where the shutter is always open.” These works implicate time as a material and underscore the ephemeral nature of being, as well as the potential for multiplicity. The viewer as well as the artist enter as subjects reflected in the work, a process Yamaoka describes as: “Never still for long, continually in motion, where the light falls, never the same way, I am caught in the process of becoming, and in the midst of disintegrating.”
In a career spanning over thirty years, Yamaoka has regularly exhibited nationally and internationally, yet the Henry exhibition will be the artist’s first solo exhibition to examine the cumulative expanse of her work. Recently, Yamaoka’s work was included in
arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified at the Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design and
Greater New York at MoMA/PS1, New York. Yamaoka is the recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2017 Anonymous Was a Woman Award. She lives and works in New York and is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy.
Carrie Yamaoka: recto/verso will run July 13 - November 3, 2019. A public opening will be held on Friday, July 12. A gallery talk with the artist will be held on Saturday, July 13. Please visit
henryart.org for details.
Carrie Yamaoka: recto/verso is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Associate Curator. Lead support is provided by Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.