Carrie Yamaoka: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear

Commonwealth and Council presents Carrie Yamaoka: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear, the artist’s second exhibition at the gallery. 

For almost three decades, Yamaoka has worked with reflective materials like polyester film and resin, creating works of an inherently provisional nature, steering clear of the pictorial. The artist’s experimental process-driven works, spanning painting, photography, and sculpture, result from a series of layerings and interventions. She often disrupts the surface of reflective polyester film, abrading it against everyday materials or surfaces such as bubble wrap or the studio walls and floor. Once mounted over panel, she pours resin over the film, preserving captured patterns and noise on its surface.

The works’ manipulated mirror-like surfaces impel the viewer to assume an active role in the resulting fugitive image while also remaining subject to the surface’s optical mediations. Objective documentation of works proves futile, the self-timed camera on a tripod or the artist’s own body always present in the photograph as a ghostly record of a particular fleeting moment, in time, space, light, and life, one among infinite permutations of being. The translucent viscosity of the works intimates a nascent quality, always in a state of becoming, refusing fixed pictorial or narrative resolution. Vinyl retains the residue of the artist’s fingerprints, and forms a resist to the resin, progressing in barely perceptible increments after the work finishes its engagement with the artist’s hand. Plastic initially resists the application of plastic, then accepts it, settling into rivulets as if in a perpetual state of wetness. The unintended consequence of the lifting off of paint from the verso of polyester film onto its face, forms delicate lines impossible to have been drawn by hand. Yamaoka attempts to capture in her work the liminal moment in the darkroom, when the image begins to emerge on the print, representational, abstract, and in between, all at the same time.

For Yamaoka, the studio operates akin to a laboratory, always subject to the surprises of error, defect, and chance. A rigorous self-editor, she returns to her previous works with a critical eye—the exhibition features a number of objects which Yamaoka has revisited and reworked. Densities of material accrue or are stripped away to create a newly transformed object whose surface embodies evidence of its understory. Ripping apart material from its previously affixed substrate, Yamaoka wrestles with and reconfigures her own histories, deconstructing and reconstituting them. 

Author and viewer, subject and object confuse and reorient themselves. Within the site-responsive encounter, the viewer (re)makes the work, underscoring how we make our own pictures out of what we see—and understand ourselves and the world—through our manifold subjectivities and interactions.