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Time Out New York
January 15, 1998
Debs &Co. 525 West 26th Street, Chelsea
Carrie Yamaoka makes paintings that are essentially mirrors. Her process is simple enough: She coats Mylar sheets with layers of resin. The Mylar is reflective and provides some color, while the resin occludes the surface just enough to make things visually interesting. On paper, this should all sound very familiar: The mirror as art is hardly news. In the '60s, Michelangelo Pistoletto made mirror pieces, and Lucas Samaras mirrored whole rooms. Warhol employed the blank, all-encompassing quality of silver Mylar to great effect. And high-gloss resin finishes have been the seductive staple of L.A. artist John McCracken for a couple of decades now. In recent years, Andrea Rosen and Tom Jones have curated strong shows of younger artists using the mirror motif. So why is Yamaoka's installation so stunningly fresh? Yamaoka works in a few different formats, which correspond roughly to head, body and standard painting sizes. She's installed her pieces in quirky combinations that enliven Debs and Co's choppy architecture, the distortion effects stopping just short of fun-house frivolity. In Big Bubbly, a blurry surface is regularly interrupted by blisters in the Mylar. In each bubble, your image snaps back into crisp focus, and bug-eyed versions of your face are multiplied dozens of times over. In another work, gentle veils of smoky resin allow you to see yourself as if you were about to surface from a clear, dark lake. Admittedly, some viewers will swing quickly through the show, stopping only to fix their hair or cruise the stranger behind them; they'll see no difference between Yamaoka's restrained art and the thing hanging in the bathroom. Other gallerygoers won't be able to think about anything but how the lines around their eyes reflect their hard lives. What I find most compelling, though, is that the image in the mirror is always determined by someone other than the artist; Yamaoka, in effect, has given up control of her work. Yet somehow she still winds up inscribing herself upon the whole parade of random events forever reflected in these vessels. by Bill Arning
published in Time Out New York Issue No. 121. |
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