QUEENS INTERNATIONAL 4

Joseph Beuys coined the phrase “social sculpture,” and Nicolas Bourriaud developed the theory of relational aesthetics. Whatever the terms, viewers’ involvement is central to this show of work made in Queens. Derick Melander’s installation doubles as a community clothing drive; Heidi Boisvert developed a video game to raise awareness about human trafficking; Las Hermanas Iglesias designed a disco floor with a soundtrack that talks dancers through steps that are a mashup of merengue and polka. Nonparticipatory standouts include Sin-ying Ho’s porcelain sculptures decorated with images of Mao and Bruce Lee, Amy Yoes' meditative architectural animation, and Okamoto Studio’s ice Buddha (displayed in a refrigerated unit), which is replaced when it melts—a reminder that change is inevitable. Queens Museum of Art, Through April 26.

(The New Yorker, 04.01.09)

50,000 BEDS
Interview by Chris Doyle

CD: I was wondering how staying in that particular hotel room shaped the animation that you made, Room 863?

AY: The large plate glass window and the view from the room became the perfect time and place for the piece to happen. The project is specific to that room on that day.

CD: How do you think about the relationship between your sculpture and your animation work?

AY: The sculpture and video are really one world manifested in different ways. With each medium, whether it's painting, photography, video, or sculpture, the driving question is: what can be done? Like the branches of a tree, each offshoot represents the natural growth of one aspect of my obsessions and influences.

CD: Your final animation pieces are abstract in sculptural terms (or at least they're not figurative.) Do you have a clear narrative in your mind when you're working on them?

AY: There is a lot of suspense as I am working. I start with rough parameters, and the action that results is a record of a thought process. The unfolding of the sequence of events is genuine: I shoot each frame after having moved the elements by hand. Every frame is included, so there is a finality about each choice. There is no going back to recapture a moment differently. That limitation is very liberating.

CD: As someone who works a lot in stop-action, I realize the importance of the soundtrack in creating a atmosphere for the piece. Your piece sounds terrific. How did you make it?

AY: When I make a painting, I often have a mental soundtrack that goes along with it. Sometimes lyrical, sometimes tonal, sound has always been implied in my work. Making videos allows me to bring the sound out, and to use the same scavenging process I use in the visual aspects of my paintings, drawings, and installations. I build a sound landscape that adds a narrative drive to the sequence, using familiar and unfamiliar sounds for their abstract and emotional qualities.

(50,000 Beds catalogue, 2007)

ANOMALOUS STATE OF AFFAIRS
by Jennifer McGregor

Anomalous State of Affairs by Amy Yoes explores Edgar Allan Poe’s idiosyncratic ideas about interior space as introduced in his 1840 essay "The Philosophy of Furniture," and as articulated his short story "William Wilson." Following these texts, Yoes constructs a scenario of relationships loosely based Poe’s humorous diatribe about interior design and the idea of an "evil twin." Highly critical of the American approach to furnishing, Poe speaks out against the arrangement of furniture, curtains, carpet, glare, and glitter. In his fiction the setting shapes the actions, emotions and motivations of the people who inhabit them. For instance, in “William Wilson” the narrator recounts his feelings of paranoia at a school where the overbearing presence of his double is reinforced by the convoluted architecture. Synthesizing these ideas, Yoes creates a hybrid structure of interlocking planes and furniture-like forms that pushes forth in bold contradiction to the room’s classical Georgian architecture. This dense intrusion into the room suggests the psychological dislocation encountered in "William Wilson."

(from the "Poe & Twain Projects" exhibition)

AMY YOES: REAR-VIEW MIRROR
by Roberta Smith

This three-part show progresses organically from black and white to ringing color, small to large, and still photography to installation and video. As it goes, the principles of set-up photography are set in motion and enlarged to walk-in scale. If the small, elegant photographs that get the ball rolling remain the strongest work, the ensemble still brims with ambition and possibility. Michael Steinberg Fine Art, 529 West 26th Street, (212) 924-5770, through Feb. 10. (Smith)

(The New York Times, 02.02.07)

VILLAGE VOICE: BEST IN SHOW
by R.C. Baker

Yoes's huge red and yellow installation -- a cross between a skateboard ramp and a fashion-show catwalk -- exudes weird fun. Above it, shelves jut from the walls, ostensibly supporting video projections, one of right-angle lines that appear and disappear as if being endlessly devoured by invisible Pac-men, another of a writhing clay figure. In a smaller room, an exuberant black and white stop-motion animation features wedges and dots that dance across curving platforms while sinuous pipe cleaners entwine and clay lumps shimmy -- it's Gumby meets Busby Berkeley on a silvery soundstage that never was. Michael Steinberg, 526 W 26th, 212-924-5770. Through February 10.

(The Village Voice, 02.01.07)

AMY YOES AT MICHAEL STEINBERG
by David Coggins

"Rear-View Mirror," the title of Amy Yoes's recent exhibition, calls attention to what is visible behind us while we're moving forward. The work progressed from small self-contained photographs, which refered to modernist photography and design, to boldly colored installations that included video projections. This assortment of pictorial and sculptural elements ultimately leaves the wall and confront us in own space.

A series of small black-and-white photographs of abstract geometric abstract recalls the photograms of Man Ray. Little images of nonsensical constructions, Yoes's photographs have a ghostlike quality, a sort of impersonal formalism. She doesn't use photography as a means of documentation, but rather to make physical her own imagined worlds. The forms these photographs show -- a crumpled piece of paper, a sort of sloped wainscoting -- became the foundation for the entire show.

The installation Rear-View Mirror Wall Piece (2007) centered on a combination of shelves that began well above eye level and spread across the wall. The shelves obstructed our view of the objects they held, forcing us to step back and see stacks of black cloth arraged on top of them, and wooden studs leaning against the wall. Yoes is very aware that we like to define boundaries between disciplines, and she offers us no such reassurance. We are forced to question why we seek comfort in the purity of form. In her work, basic structural shapes progress into design elements, where they alternate between necessity and redundancy. The contrasts are stark enough to be jarring, and the response to the work depends, to a certian extent, on how rewarding one finds that visual friction.

All the various components of Yoes's work came together in Rear-View Mirror (2007), an installation that incorporated stop-action animation and a dose of strong color. Vivid red and yellow wedges sat at odd angles in real space -- one was attached to a structural pillar of the gallery itself -- while a line of projected light snaked along the wall. A projected animation showed the slow growth of a morphing sculpted ball. The boundaries that keep art from intruding into real space disintegrated before us.

(Art In America, April 2007)

INTERVENTION/LOOKING BACKWARD
by Craig Kellogg

Bauhaus meets gingerbread house. That's one way to describe Rear-View Mirror, Amy Yoes's playful installation integrating architectural construction with video projection. One potential explanation for her long-standing interest in the fine-art application of decorative flourishes, the subject of many of her paintings, photographs, and three-dimension work: at age 48, Yoes recalls living through post-modernism the first time around. "You get the sense that things from different directions have come together," she admits. "I'm a gleaner."

For this piece, shown at New York's Michael Steinberg Fine Art, an MDF platform sported an unexpected sunny yellow. "It's an 'oops' paint from Home Depot -- a color that didn't work out for someone else," Yoes says. She, however, loved it so much that she had more mixed. Also yellow is the claymation blob that morphs restlessly on the wall behind the main structure. These Sesame Street elements balance the geometric rigor of a stout cadmium-red drywall triangle that appears to buttress the gallery's concrete column.

Yoes documented the temporay installation in photographs, which will influence future works. The piece itself could never have been for sale, pragmatically speaking -- although, she adds, "We did say 'price upon request.'"

(Interior Design magazine, February 2007)

ONE IF BY LIGHT, TWO IF BY SEE
by Kate Anania

Morning is not the optimal time to visit the Fireside Lounge inside the Peppermill Inn, and everyone else seems to think so, too. Aside from four Midwestern expats ensconced firmly in front of the Lounge's flaming central fountain with three trays of chicken fingers, artists Catherine Borg and Amy Yoes have no distractions as they sit down at 8:15 a.m. to have a practice run for their joint video project, Experiment Phantom Area. Instead of the Fireside's standard Rococo cocktails, they wield coffee and a television remote. Catherine stares intently at one of the 20 or so flat television screens that normally project March Madness footage or bits of Rod Stewart concerts, with the remote poised in one hand. Images of the inside of the Lounge itself appear on the screens and are refracted throughout the mirrored walls, silent and self-referential. Borg and Yoes nod, pleased.

Experiment Phantom Area was something of a fluke in respective programs of both these artists. Borg and Yoes do not have a history of collaborative projects, nor have they always dreamed of making joint video installations with each other. This project arose, as Yoes recalls, "very organically" (possibly the result of several felonies' worth of martinis enjoyed together, but perhaps not). Yoes is a New-York-based artist whose work recalls many of the best characteristics of German Baroque sculpture; she often incorporates hints of architectural orders, sconces or decorative embellishments into large wall drawings or paintings, forming designs that appear to have as much to do with Balthasar Neumann as they do with Yoes' contemporaries. Borg, an East-coast import who lives and works in Las Vegas, is most well-known for her video projections that feature clips of the city's lights and sounds, forming otherworldly montages and reflecting the passive tourist culture of Western civilization at large.

The 28-minute video sequence to be shown in the Fireside Lounge on Wednesday evening promises a wide array of reflections on the greater culture of Las Vegas, the deceptive use of space in commercial interiors and the silent bursts of light that govern all of our optical experiences. The installation's location heavily informs the content; the Fireside Lounge has been a favorite watering hole among Las Vegas artists for decades, particularly in the mid-1990s when Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari would prioritize a stop at the Lounge for a highly unnaturally-colored drink and some dialogue on soft couches. The space, which was always cavelike and fantastic, will be converted from a setting (or passive space) to being an occasion for temporo-visual engagement.

"It's almost the opposite of my recent [video] work," says Borg about the piece. "The things I've made previous to this one have focused on sort of the ambient passivity of the Strip. This piece feels a little more active."

She's right. The clips in the video were put together by Yoes and Borg, and contain flourishes and mirror refractions magnified by the Fireside's mirrored walls, incorporating the principles of mirroring that Yoes identifies as key. "Visually, a mirror is a portal that you can carry around," she says. "It can extend a space and be used to deceive it's an incredible effect." The piece was quickly edited using simple cuts, which causes some of the still shots to cut mawkishly into each other.

A simultaneously shuddering and steady presence, Experiment Phantom Area is a contemporary reflection on the persuasive Baroque details that color the city. Often identified as the style of absolutes, the Baroque style (seen in various permutations among the works of both artists, most especially Yoes) emerges here as an active fantasy that exposes both passive and spectacular elements of looking.

Hooked onto the lights and action on the screen, visitors to the Fireside Lounge Wednesday night will be puzzled or captivated, but most certainly not alienated. The clinks of food will fall into an effortless harmony with Experiment Phantom Area's soundtrack and pictures, like it does on this early morning, but the pictures will refract themselves into abstraction in a way no one ever noticed them do with the slick March Madness clips. There will be flashes of color that capture pieces of the Las Vegas skyline, but not all of it. The whole scene will, in some measure, embody the seductive and arresting aspects of the city that unite artists, drinkers, waitresses, spectators, tourists and academics alike.

(Las Vegas City Life, 05.11.06)

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