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Take Five
by LD Beghtol
Amy Yoes, an ex-Texan whose intricate paintings, drawings, and constructions have graced galleries in New York, Chicago, and Lisbon, among other cities, loves fluttering pastel-hued ribbons. But there's nothing saccharine or merely decorative about this Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant winner's lushworks; instead, her anthropomorphic swashes and serenely menacing architectural fragments weave themselves into a dreamlike world that recalls Richard Dadd's surreal Victorian allegories (sans the little fairies, but with even more sexual intrigue). Her new show Room Tone is at Michael Steinberg Fine Art through February 12.
1 What's so appealing about those fragments you use? I think it's the idea of removing something from its original context so it can be used in a different way. Some I think of as beloved characters that play a recurring role in my paintings . . . sometimes in a different context or in a new costume. It's like, "Hey, that's so-and-so!"
2 What're your favorite motifs? The intertwining impulse has always interested me, both for the psychological and biological implications. All cultures use it—the knot, the interlace. It's hardwired in us.
3 Your new works were painted from models, little stage sets— That's something I've wanted to do for a long time, but it only came into focus when I built Beehive [a retrospective in miniature of Yoes's work in a model studio]. I'm fascinated by the idea of implied physical space that's actually a psychological space. The decorative elements are there, but there's an architectural sense that's new—
4 And thus "room tone"? Yes—I'm really inspired by the specificity of place, the way a room and what's in it affect sound. Sound as an idea is rather elusive, like trying to describe what a painting is about. If my paintings of the past were about music, the new ones are more about sound.
5 Are you a musician? No, I'm not, not at all—but I wish I were. I don't even know whether to say I wish I played violin or fiddle. That's always the real conflict for me: Bauhaus or gingerbread.
(Village Voice, 01.12.05)
Artforum.com Critics' Picks
by Elizabeth Schambelan
Bellflowers and barley twists, fruiting finials and dogs-of-Fo handles: The vocabulary of ornament is as recondite, in its way, as that of particle physics—though much more flamboyant. And just as most of us don't know the terms, we don't really see the forms they describe, though they surround us—on building façades, picture frames, wallpaper, furniture. Amy Yoes, on the other hand, has built a practice around her scrutiny of the motifs of various decorative traditions, which she tweaks and transforms (with digital help) and uses as the basis of sculptures, drawings, and paintings. At Michael Steinberg, a series of small sepia-ink-on-paper drawings articulates a lexicon of intricate curvilinear shapes, which are echoed on a larger scale in a giant drawing that unfurls across two walls. Similar forms crop up in five new oil paintings, where they're crisply rendered in inspiredly off-kilter color and put in play across impossible pictorial spaces with multiple vanishing points. More of Yoes's paintings are on view, albeit as tiny maquettes, in Beehive, 2003, a "retrospective" installed in a modernist dollhouse-museum. If the limits of one's language form the limits of one's world, Yoes—by activating a dormant visual language that permeates the everyday—pushes the boundaries back a little bit further.
(Artforum.com, 01.13.05)
Amy Yoes: Room Tone
by Joyce Korotkin
Amy Yoes' Room Tone, a complex installation of interrelated parts whose sum total presents a kind of retrospective of her own body of work reads as a metaphor for the interior landscape of public and private memory. All of the works in this show; paintings, sculpture, and ink wall drawings, re-appear in miniature in the heart of the exhibition, an intricate sculpture titled Beehive, 2003. Something of a cross between an architectural model and an elaborate post-modernist doll house, this piece functions as both an artwork in the show, as well as a miniature museum repository for work that Yoes has created since her days at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984. Filled with psychological spaces one can peer into, the model serves as an interior and exterior replica of not only the artist's personal and professional history in the art world.
The pool on one side of the house, for instance, replicates an installation the artist once created, in which white marble amphora on red felt circles floated around like giant lily pads on a lovely lake, propelled by hoses. Inside, echoing the cycles of studio life, works are hung or set leaning against the walls, as if they were still in progress or perhaps waiting to be shipped out to a show or sent to a collector. On the upper levels of the construction are models of works yet to come, the embodiment of ideas still in formation.
In the main space of the "real" gallery, the originals of works that are represented in miniature within the model are exhibited. Five colorful, nearly kinetic paintings, each with multiple vanishing points, are hung in a row. Graphic, flat and yet full of illusionistic depth, they contain a pastiche of decorative images from architecture and theatrical sets. Scaffolding, balconies and platforms careen around in skewed space with no gravitational anchor. Ornamental embellishments float around like dancing satin ribbons. The effect is that of a visualization of a wild musical composition.
Huge, site-specific sepia ink drawings, reminiscent of 18th century nature studies, grace the gallery walls. Derived from Yoes' filigree and flourish pattern paintings, titled Fragments, some of these works intertwine around the gallery's structural columns in the center of the room. If one stands in a particular spot (subtly marked on the floor), the drawings on the column and the wall, beyond, coalesce perfectly into one greater whole which is emblematic of the structure of this idiosyncratic exhibition in which every element, as if in a huge puzzle, falls into place to complete the picture.
(www.thenewyorkartworld.com)
Sightseers Folklore
by Jennifer McGregor
In Sightseers Folklore, Amy Yoes painted intertwining decorative motifs in bold red ink directly on the walls of the sunroom. Inspiration for this project comes from a wide range of sources including Greco-Roman painted interiors, to 19th century Scandinavian folk traditions, to the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts. She chose to work in a monochromatic red to contrast the green foliage out the window and to draw attention to the individuality of each motif. "Architectural accretions" in each section appear to belong in the room, but act as devices to accentuate the composition's dimensionality and draw the eye from the wall to the ceiling. In this project and in her paintings, she is fascinated by the irrepressible urge to create intertwining motifs that is universal to all cultures throughout time. She sees this as a manifestation of our innate humanness, not only rooted in our expression but in our bodies, such as the vascular, muscle, and circulatory systems.
(from the catalogue of Out of Bounds, a group exhibition at Wave Hill, 2005)
Video Art Engulfs Fireside Lounge
by Kristen Peterson
The 40-ish brunette, with the billowing '80s hairstyle and perfectly applied makeup, leans over her vodka (straight up, one olive), scrunches her nose and asks the bartender about the noise from the video that has been playing over and over on the 15 large-screen plasma televisions throughout Peppermill's Fireside Lounge.
When the bartender explains that it's part of an art show, the woman squeals and smiles: "Oh, is it live or something?"
Then she immediately whispers, "I don't like it."
Behind her, a completely different reaction is taking place.
Other patrons who have trickled into the mirrored lounge specifically for the video installation, Experiment Phantom Area, are slouched in pods of U-shaped sofas, mesmerized by the 28-minute video.
The Fireside - with its fire pool, fake plants and trees, selection of tropical drinks and colored lights - is known to locals as the partly hip, partly kitschy make-out place. It has been featured in several movies and, some say, ruined recently by its televisions blaring pop and rock videos.
But that's exactly what inspired the art project, conceived when New York artist Amy Yoes walked into the lounge in March. Yoes, who works in several mediums, had come to Las Vegas as an artist-in-residence at UNLV.
"I was completely enchanted by the Peppermill," Yoes says, her skin reflecting the pink glow of the dimly lit lounge.
She was pulled in by the fire pool and the TV screens that "magnify and fracture the space so it goes on for infinity," she says. "It's such a beautifully designed special interior that is unlike any place I have ever been."
On this Wednesday evening, her collaboration with Las Vegas media artist Catherine Borg is a living, breathing experience -- originating in the lounge, mostly filmed in the lounge, showing in the lounge.
The video's slow pans over the flowers, the flaming pool and the lights of the bar result in an unintended surveillance effect, accompanied by a score of contrasting audio -- from harsh mechanical sounds to muffled noises that were almost womb-like. Yoes says the sounds are intended to be "humorously otherworldly." Other video images are slow, meditative, abstract clips of blinking lights.
Dayvid Figler, writer, attorney, National Public Radio commentator and among the local culturati who showed up for Wednesday's premiere, says the project "is a great way to invigorate what was a horrible line of sight. Ever since the Peppermill installed the video screens, I've been less than happy about the place."
But Yoes and Borg's video project, he says, "complement the experience."
Artist Yvonne Lung was amused by the video's contrast to the Fireside experience and Las Vegas scene: "You know it's Vegas, but it's somewhat distorted, somewhat changed."
Borg explains that the video was not about the Peppermill, but about "our idiosyncratic synthesis of our sensibilities in relation to the space that Las Vegas creates, not the place Las Vegas is."
Using mirrors to create abstraction, the artists wanted to go beyond the "impenetrable veneer" of Las Vegas, Yoes says, and create a portal into another interpretation of an architectural space.
The artists hope to show the video outside Las Vegas . They received permission to show the piece at the Peppermill between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., a time most customers would not complain about the absence of news, sports or a rock video on the Fireside's screens.
A 7:40 p.m., however, Experiment Phantom Area was still happening.
"Until there's a complaint, it's going to be going on forever," said Elizabeth Blau, an artist who was at the lounge.
Ten minutes later, a sole screen behind the bar flipped to the Los Angeles Clippers-Phoenix Suns playoff game.
At 8, all other screens broke into a young pop songstress playing her guitar.
The crowd, about 50 people at one point, stood up almost in unison and slowly filed out . Borg, woven bag slung over her shoulder, soon followed as a Justin Timberlake video played in the now near-empty lounge.
Still at the bar, however, is the 40-ish brunette, who has switched from vodka to red wine and now is even more bewildered. Convinced the video was shot and played live, she says that she found it disturbing "on many levels," even though she appreciated some of it.
"The flowers were great," she says, "but why did they make a deliberate effort to eliminate all the people?"
Her male companion, visiting from Connecticut, says he is exposed to a lot of entertainment.
"If they had some good music, it would have been better," he says. "Some guitar music, maybe."
(Las Vegas Sun, 05.12.06)
Post-Digital Painting
by
Joe Houston
Ornamental excess approaches visual delirium in the paintings of Amy Yoes.
Compiled from the innumerable embellishments that skirt the edges of architecture,
furniture and paper currency, her effusive images revel in the overlooked
and unappreciated details of our material world. Unhinged from their decorative
moorings, these colorful ribbons, trellises, and scrollworks swarm brazenly
beyond the picture plane, tantalizing and slightly terrorizing us with
their unruly beauty.
In the boisterous Dividing Thens by Nows, Yoes positions us directly
within a cultural maelstraom. Her centrifugal perspective elides all vanishing
points in favor of an overall visual oscillation. Space is radically warped
by the interplay of hot and cool color, contrasting patterns, and the
unexpected juxtaposition of formal elements. Lime green ruffles, hot pink
trims, and golden escutcheons entangle in mid-air, vying for attention.
Time is made indeterminate as well as the merger of decorative motifs
of diverse historical origins spanning from the Baroque to the Modern.
Made possible by image compositing software, the spatial and temporal
displacement suggested in Dividing
Thens by Nows
symbolizes our unstable perspective in a world inundated and mediated
by technology.
The polymorphous, conjunctive environment configured by Yoes' festive
forms is one that invites abandon and celebrates the eccentric. Unhierarchical
and decentered, this virtual space suggests a restructuring of the old
orders of politics, economies and genders made possible by our disembodiment
in the democratic realm of cyberspace. Yoes' ornamental expressionism
gives this marginal reality a tactile arena in which even the slightest
voice is welcome, and everything is possible, all at once.
(from the catalogue
of Post-Digital Painting, a group exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum,
December 2002)
Art 10101010101010101010 . . .
by George Tysh
(. . .) Further from surrealism, but disorienting nonetheless (though in a sexy, big-screen kind of way) are the whacked-out post-Disney excursions of Amy Yoes. Picking up decorative elements from the history of architecture and design, she creates nutty beautylands where shapes and motifs go bananas and hot colors add to the visual cacophony (pictured). Her paintings are a surreal love affair between the animated comforts of pop culture and the tropical storms of the unexpected. (. . .)
(Detroit Metro Times, 1.29.03)
Studio
View: Amy Yoes
by Laurel Frederickson
In 1993, in Santo Tirso, Portugal, Amy Yoes bisected the asymetric,
curved base of her large marble sculpture and topped it with two winged
urns. She named the work Capriccio. "Caprice," "capriole," and
"caper" seem to follow unbidden behind this title, which may be applied
even more aptly to Yoes' recent paintings. They call attention to qualities
at odds with conventions of most serious art, and suggest a dalliance
with the decorative. Yoes' paintings of labyrinthine floating worlds
flaunt propriety. Willful, flighty, and unstable, they flirt and tease,
frivolously making a spectacle of poetic excess. To spend time with
them is to participate in something of an ironic, "feminine" babbling.
They are over-the-top patchworks, which betray a debt to a thrift-store
aesthetic of unexpected conjunctions.
Yoes' works also stand in respectful relation to Western painting traditions,
and while the images may seem impulsive and irrational, the process
of making them is, in fact, precise and deliberate. With preparatory
sketches and drawings, a large painting may take up to a year to complete.
The most recent paintings verge in color toward bright cartoon-like
pastels can be as large as six- by seven-feet. The palette of a series
of smaller works is limited to a strange, rather cloying, combination
of cadmium red, white, and black.
In her search for motifs Yoes mines the history of art and architecture,
as well as that of the decorative arts. She freely distorts swags, lozenges,
rosettes, scrolls, cartouches, escutcheons, shells, curlicues, and ruffles,
and studies with fascination how ornament mutates over time. The image
of bamboo painted on Chinese pottery, as Yoes might see it, has migrated
through Rococo chinoiserie to tiki bars in basement dens. She rediscovers
these motifs in thrift store, transfering them to paintings with all
connotations intact. Yoes calls her use of the decorative a deliberate
strategy to centralize the marginal, the ignored, and the denigrated.
"All art has a decorative function," she tells me."It is a Modernist
fallacy that the Minimal has greater moral authority."
In an apparent mockery of "moral authority," a red ribbon curls through
one of Yoes' paintings. It carefully twists around a floating frame
to affirm its fictional solidity and then passes right through it somewhere
else. Later -- or is it earlier? -- it weaves swiftly through a lazily
floating piece of drapery as if the two occupied disconnected dimensions.
Elsewhere, a succession of purple lilies bursts into view, while indecipherable
calligraphic passages -- like monograms that have escaped from their
towels -- come to rebellious life and dance away. With multiple centers
and vanishing points, Yoes' paintings eschew conventions that establish
a prescribed order to viewing. Consequently, they have been misleadingly
compared to Pollock's action paintings, but these are not flat fields
that bear the record of a body's action in time. They are windows into
deep narrative spaces: you have the sense of looking into rather
than being in them.
The pile of quilts Yoes has inherited from her maternal lineage are the more direct ancestors of these paintings. You can see how the interweaving of patterns in quilts, as well as the non-heroic, painstaking, and appropriative process used to make them have influenced her aesthetic and approach. Originally from Texas, Yoes spent many years in Chicago and has a number of important international connections. (She recently completed a major sculptural commission for the 1998 Lisbon World's Exposition.) A recent move has placed her in San Francisco's cacophonous Mission district. However, I can't shake the feeling that Yoes' paintings are "Southern" and "rural" in their stylized femininity and their unabashedly decorative imagery: the surface language of domesticated space. In her paintings ornament refuses to subordinate itself to structure. Form does not follow function. Instead, Yoes' works revel in pleasure.
For the French feminist Hélène Cixous such work derives
its energy from a feminine libidinal economy that exaggerates the "inferior"
qualities it has been assigned by a patriarchal order, and whose pleasuring,
or jouissance, exceeds the bounds of decorum. Yoes' paintings exhibit this boundless eros and derive their power from an underlying threat that they may to out of control at any moment.
The endless movement, perceptual tricks, and spatial ambiguities of
Yoes' work offer a target for the kinds of attacks that nineteenth century
critics made on the Baroque, which jettisoned the ministries of truth
and the beauty of God to serve ambition and caprice, luxury and pomp,
becoming utterly corrupt and false.
This seems like the kind of critique that men make of "wanton" women.
It may be relevant to know that Yoes once painted the top half of her
body green and, snakes in hand, calmly party-hopped as a Minoan goddess
in Chicago's November cold. In the protean worlds she creates, "eros
never stops traveling." We are offered countless avenues of pleasure
but denied closure's satiation as we decode the fragments Yoes has collected
in the bright and yet melancholoy spirit of what Walter Benjamin might
have called a revived Postmodern Baroque.
(New Art Examiner,
September 1998)
Ubiquitous Kiss:
New Paintings
Amy Yoes takes the decorative detail -- the adorning accent, the tiniest trimming usually seen only in the periphery -- and puts it front and center in her highly ornate, expressive works. In doing so, she creates a new language for painting: one that transforms decorative art into fine art while visually exploring the historical foundations of both.
With a blatant scoff at minimalism, Yoes takes embellishment to the max, jamming an impossible number of ribbons, scrolls, ruffles, swags, moldings, friezes, trimmings and calligraphic swirls into each large, multifaceted work. In these masterful montages that "centralize the marginal," embellishments ranging from Baroque finery to modern graphics twist and turn like vines run wild, belying the meticulous preparation behind these seemingly impulsive works.
"My work is very lyrical," says Yoes."It's inspired by the process of creating a musical composition: starting with a theme, layering in the sub themes, building a comprehensive whole with both sweeping movements and minute intricacies."
Such sweeping motions keep the work in a perpetual motion reminiscent of action painters, yet the carefully executed worlds of abstract pattern form static counterpoints. This dichotomy is entirely deliberate. Yoes' large paintings, some up to 10 feet, feature multiple and varied narratives without a single focal point, and all aim to keep the viewer in a constant state of searching.
Yoes finds decades, if not centuries, of inspiration in what surrounds her -- from architectural details and interior images in decorative arts books to the odd thrift store, tiki bar or chinoiserie find. She then fuses it all together and takes us on a journey that walks the fine line between classical elegance and romantic kitsch -- without an exposed seam in sight.
(Lauren Parker, from the introduction to the Ubiquitous Kiss exhibition at Stefan Stux Gallery)
Amy Yoes at The Cultural Center
by James Yood
Amy
Yoes' recent paintings celebrate the mesmerizing language of the Western
decorative tradition. Sometimes surprisingly suggestive of the rhythmic
tempos of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, her canvases churn with
visual incidents that overflow the picture plane. But, in a manner completely
unlike Pollock's, Yoes' images remain firmly entrenched in history,
a labor-intensive aquiescence to ornamental pictorial traditions usually
overlooked or considered bankrupt. Carefully delineated ruffles and
flourishes are at the heart of Yoes' work: her paintings become labyrinthine
mazes of painted festoons, curlicues, garlands, tassels, ribbons, and
brocades.
Salvaged from a wide variety of sources -- including manuals of ornamental
motifs -- Yoes' pictorial data form an encyclopedic compendium of decorative
tradition while still managing to investigate its underlying themes
and impulses. Her paintings hover between nature and abstraction, illustrating
that, throughout their development, decorative formal designs have had
their roots in conscious efforts to regulate and systematize the natural
world. Plant and leaf forms, in particular, were flattened into an ordered
geometrization, the impulse for growth determinedly redirected into
an impulse to create patterns. In Yoes' work, though, this system is
encouraged to run riot in a delightful and ahistorical neo-Rococo excess:
explosive and meandering proliferations of elements accrete in dizzying,
layered inventories of motifs.
A keen eye for calligraphic motives perpetually informs this work. In
Ultra Arpeggio, 1992, Yoes shuffles together centuries of pictorial
devices, ranging from Renaissance architectural ornament -- itself drawn
from antiquity -- to passages reminescent of the work of Pollock and
grafitti artists. But Yoes' work most strongly suggests a late-Baroque
world view -- a mannered and hothouse elegance wrought from a risky
overindulgence in ephemera. Things are jammed together into an ornate
trellis in which decorative impulses are both means and ends, creating
a complex language and coloratura. Carefully orchestrated color plays
no small role in all this, and Yoes uses glazes to mute what is otherwise
a very broad palette, ranging from bright blues and oranges to a more
dominant and sedate sepia. In Foraminifera Nocturne, 1992, Yoes'
repertoire of motifs swirls more decidedly in the center of the panel,
like a whirlpool that seemingly absorbs energy and attention. This is
a tour de force, a delicate performance intriguing to witness and dissect.
Yoes' inexhaustible and endlessly malleable motifs always lead to a
renewal of the possibilities of the formal and historical legacies of
her source materials. She ressuscitates them to employ them more spectacularly,
transforming their supportive and attendant role into a central one.
(Exhibition
review in Artforum, October 1992)
Amy
Yoes at Space
by Sue Taylor
In these exhuberant oil-on-wood panels, Amy Yoes revisits a heady moment in the 1970s when the Pattern and Decoration movement revitalized American painting. Luxuriating on the profuse ornament that swirls across her pictures, one thinks of the liberating gestures of Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff and Miriam Schapiro. There is of course a difference: Yoes's paeans to the decorative impulse are also post-modern amalgams of historical motifs, from Greek-key designs to insular interlace and Renaissance grotesques. Her bold, intricate paintings include passages of Abstract-Expressionism splatter and drip, often relegated to the background or upstaged by a riot of calligraphic flourishes and rhythmic geometries. The high-art modernist code for individual spontaneity thus becomes just another element in Yoes' survey of the human tendency to embellish.
The seven panels in this exhibition echo the allover compositions of
Action Painting, but Yoes replaces Pollock's tangled skeins and de Kooning's
Cubist-derived scaffolds with lovingly rendered ribbons, ruffles, drapery
and tasseled cords. The motifs are chaotically juxtaposed in a deceptively
shallow space where forms advance and reced with dizzying abandon. Scale,
too, sems arbitrary and out of whack, as details that could have originated
on a belt buckle or teacup explode into monumental proportions. Yoes
lifts her motifs from wallpaper, linoleum, wrought-iron gates, picture
frames, kitchen appliances, restaurant china -- things close at hand,
yet so forgettable that one strains to identify familiar patterns. Released
from the articles or surfaces they adorn, Yoes's ordinarily marginal
palmettes, leafy spirals, scrolls and intertwined or addorsed letters
assume the lofty status of subject matter.
Still clinging to these decontextualized fragments are culturally determined
associations: some designs look "regal," others "exotic," "official"
or "50s modern." Yoes's retro palette of orange and turquoise, mauve,
olive and rust, suggest a nostalgia for aging hotel lobbies, faded greeting
cards and antique jewelry. The titles, such as Blush Now Dusty Sweets,
No Lack of Suitors and Ubiquitous Kiss, create a mood
off old-fashioned romance.
Yoes's work also brings to mind the Victorian-era English architect
Owen Jones. Like Jones's classic book Grammar of Ornament, Yoes's
paintings direct an appreciative, historicist gaze on ornamental detail
through the ages. But in contrast to Jones's neat catalogue of decoration,
in Yoes's richly inventive and sumptuous panels the history of ornament
comes alive, and runs energetically amok.
(Exhibition
review in Art In America, May 1995)
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