Gallery Talk with Carrie Yamaoka & Joy Episalla 

Join us for a gallery conversation in conjunction with the opening of Carrie Yamaoka: recto/verso. Yamaoka will be in conversation with fellow artist, collaborator, and longtime partner Joy Episalla and Henry Associate Curator Nina Bozicnik to discuss the larger social and cultural context for her practice and its evolution, and how questions of visibility and perception have and continue to inform Yamaoka’s work since the early 1990s.

Carrie Yamaoka is a visual artist working in the expanded field of painting. After moving to Tokyo as a teenager, Yamaoka graduated from Wesleyan University in 1979 and then moved to New York City, where she continues to live. Her early immersion in photography and experimental music has informed her decades-long explorations of form and process in her art practice. Yamaoka has exhibited her work since the 1980s in the US and in Europe, including recently in Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2015-2016) and four chapters of arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified at the Beeler Gallery, at the Columbus College of Art and Design (2018-2019). Her work is included in the collections of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; The Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Yamaoka is the recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2017 Anonymous Was a Woman Award. She is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy.

Joy Episalla is an interdisciplinary artist whose work pushes photography and the moving image into the territory of sculpture. Solo exhibitions and projects include Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris; International Center of Photography, New York; Participant, Inc., New York; Debs & Co., New York; and Mercer Union, Toronto. Group exhibitions include Beeler Gallery Columbus College of Art; Greater New York, MoMA/PS1; Brooklyn Museum; Artists Space, New York; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. A longtime AIDS activist, Episalla is a board member of TAG Treatment Action Group and a founding member of the queer women artists’ collective fierce pussy. This fall her work can be seen in arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified: Chapter Five at the ICA in Philadelphia. Episalla lives and works in New York City.