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)





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)





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)





X DIAGRAMS FROM WHERE AMY YOES OR
by Iain Kerr

a line extending out across a domestic horizon purposefully pushing through the scale and speed of airport luggage systems and strip mall signage penetrates and folds back densely into Sears Roebuck Victorian gingerbread bouncing through the Neo-Gothic, Mies, Loos, the monochrome and then fills in the fault lines of Constructivism, Alberti, DeLobkowitz, undergarment frills and a Keaton set.

at the arrival of the black square and the white canvas -- our wall clothed -- comes in the unrolling of the monochrome -- a new type of surface performing as a post-domestic site -- the site of projection. the quick turn around -- an interior partition wall separated from the future home of the house perfect hovers taking upon itself various guises. we do not to know where we will be next -- but we know that it will always now be this space. then an art that begins with this space as a history of practices compressed into MDF, gypsum and three coats of paint. the white fabrics of the partition wall comes to haunt the core of an unfolding of modernism -- an ornamental crime of cutting into the screen -- the monochrome of an awaiting, the monochrome of a whatever wall -- the fresh paint coming into the victorian parlor. a world made almost solely of the shaped canvas -- blocks -- whatever blocks

the speed of it becoming a "whatever" block or space is agreed to far to quickly as these words confirm themselves in being read -- the frontal dimensions of these blocks of space open up as we are situated in the stretch of our bodies -- the perspectival infinite or at least unlocating distances of the block is turned -- pushed -- prespectiva obliqua -- once a method of illustration becomes now a method.

sensation happens -- it is something we (almost) do. colors lift or fall, weigh or do not weight, extend out or back, hum or whistle. "oops colors" are used throughout -- the colors mixed at the paint store and then rejected by customers -- the nearly right but not right enough become our family of sensations. a set of desires almost met, renovation projects, redecoration ideas, media campaigns, promotional schemes, life changes. almost. at our feet, greeting our torso, craning our necks -- mistakes of the day to collect the monochrome. monochromes that happen in blocks. blocks of sensations -- continuously jump through zones of alternating perspectives (something felt). the feeling of Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria -- force, dynamism and motion of a spatial taste or bodily posture -- a curling straight line of a thick color -- it is this thick color as posture that torques through the space. "color make us philosophize" (Wittgenstein).

colors of future worlds mixed to be left behind:

X colors.

"The white of the wall always important in terms of the integration of the piece with the space. Implies action of becoming or dissolving...relation to time. Bright yellow, to be seen in the dark. Cadmium red light. The perfect color. Black, for action." (Yoes)

impossible home unspeakable home pleasures serpentine weaving -- the bending at corners of space. pause. a list of places:

vegas two blocks off the strip, a ranch house, the strip mall, an airport luggage conveyer, a cartoon stage, small domestic provisional additions, alberti’s piazzi, an architectural model, schwitters, doll house interiors, the back space of a tatlin poster

with this the heavenly spheres of these ideal types (we bring them) are now understood to be governed by delicate sublunary forces under neon lights and taxi departures from bus shelters back lit glow (tomorrow a different campaign)

"Back lit and dim in front. It creates very different worlds in one room. Light that happens in an organic way... doesn't try too hard." (Yoes)

it is not forms (our ideal types) that create the universe but rather that force creates form -- the form of the present a wandering self thickening margin turning at limits. shadows, trims, frills, curlicues, additions --a thick middle -- the discordant, the disjunctive, the excessive -- now the fabric of a refined world of rationality and balance. the distorted forms that oblique architecture historically built -- normally designed such that at a singular physically embodied point they allowed access to a privileged point of view from which the world could be seen undistorted. multiple prespectives perhaps -- but in accord none the less. here something else. liebnitz ends at this point where this work begins: "fold according to fold".

(a footnote carried forward from the previous paragraph) in the artist’s personal history (then): from sky space to ground space from ideal to pragmatic as a radical empiricism.

(a further addition) the comparative table -- the grid -- that begins the modern -- the possibility of comparison is here given (in jest) as a series of unhinged mullions moldings. sky space to stage space -- illusions which show humanity its role in a theater of forces that ascend towards

once devine jest

perhaps a history of how things become what they are to us and how they become recognizable as that something could be written by a simple description of the bases that support sculptures. pheidias’s bases, bernini’s bases, pottery barn bases, civil war memorial bases -- how something is held, supported, and given a space in which -- and through which -- it can be approached is an ontology of the praxis that grounds us in the everyday of actions. our tables, sideboards, shelves, diner trays, podiums, mantel-shelves, stages, pedestals give rise to a specific contour of a way of being in this world. here the mantel piece is too high and the stage to low, the shelf to weak and the frame too small -- or more precisely the inverse: the wanderer too heavy, without reach, and drifting to slowly? how does this meeting begin to happen?

prespectiva artificialis: architettura obliqua transformed: a stance a gaze a walk a series of bodies in torque. (lightness: the phyronic, the stoic). something puzzling -- the oddness of reading monteverdi while listing to his work -- the ear and eye moving apart: "3 principal passions or affections: anger, temperance, humility". delight in and under torque.

"Recognition of a proposal of the way things are. Mysterious familiarity. Elements of experience and interest individual to each viewer. Pleasure of reading." (Yoes)

vision after anamorphic projection -- the making vision active. body vision. vision that begins in-between spaces (the eye and ear separate -- seeing from the feet) -- not in an anything vision -- not in the head vision. postures and subtle contortions of the body as vision. at some point in moving with this work across thresholds, through spaces, into infinite loops -- speeds have changed, body angles, postures, stances have shifted. come into me as i fold you out

foldings to an infinity. detour. "In the actual use of expressions we make detours, we go by side roads. We see the straight highway before us, but of course we cannot use it, because it is permanently closed" (Wittgenstein). the detour here is always, it seems, via the Baroque. but nothing comes out Baroque -- where in the process of a detour set up for us at each turn (and throughout Yoes’s history of works) the invisible winds billowing out garments, of the twisting of decorative scrolls, and the pushing out and distending out of scale of blobs -- that force -- a non localizable force -- produces form. forces become infinite and this infinity multiplies and divides all forms.

"Time changes it. The time of re-invention and regeneration natural to all human activities. the time it takes for one human life-cycle and the time of eras in terms of zeitgeist and style. recycling of energy forces that have an underlying continuity, yet are different with each generation. I like the idea of a natural force moving through, as if it is an electromagnetic reality that one can tap into at will." (Yoes)

Perfection is no longer the tranquillity of a regal stasis of pure forms but the multiplication and inflection of matter under and radiating from these spaces. between or in the vegas airport gift store pressed dense with architectural histories meeting rejected possible colors -- a bit of gum, or Krapp’s banana drawer.

If forms are these strange delightful oops’s of a dust free side board -- secondary (if we can still use such distinctions) -- then they can claim no independence and hence we are everywhere part of the flowering of the arts of combinations and multiplicity's -- an extended fugue that strives towards the becomings of an impure dynamism -- an oops event.

A world that is fluid and infinite in its dynamism and impenetrability is a world that rises upward, that ascends in flourishes of painted garlands, draperies, spirals, and luminous petticoat frills. but here this history -- this event hits the ground hard -- (much has shifted). It is an organization that develops out of the unformed, towards -- well seemingly towards disorders that converge and perhaps multiplicity's that give way to oneness. Disordered visions giving way to clarity -- but of what? and when is this happening? Resolution is not denied -- it is simply a portal this work loops through -- a blob forming as an unformed form becoming a paradoxically perfect blob and reforming as one and the same abject blob -- turning. these seeming contradictions are rigorously cultivated as an a-contradicatotry form. here one wanders further afield with the infinite pleating of oblique perspectives to suggest an ungainly creature out of scale with its own gestures -- more a ghost of unformed matter -- the cast aside ball of tape -- blue humor being pulled from the wall

the baroque gesture and drape is not involved in a trajectory of unveiling (ideology) but in an infinite (un)raveling in which all depth -- all essence reveals itself as surface -- as a continuous theatrical surface that produces depth through the dense pleating of a line of mobieal transformations which never quite return. almost returns.

"Stages, parlors, construction sites with scaffolding that accommodate things like trees and aspects of buildings, streetscapes with 'ghost' windows...(lintels and sills remaining after the window has long been blocked up.) Unbuildable spaces of paintings and the stage-like quality of early Italian Renaissance townscapes turning towards us via paintings by the likes of Fra Angelico." (Yoes)

In this dialectic of distance and nearness -- materiality begins to unhinge -- strip mall materialism -- theatre materialism in the mind of a materialist theatre. in a world where forms are overturned, allegory reigns. a mind space is introduced. and almost not introduced. we are welcomed as one’s that must begin from indirect means. what reigns as one moves through the front gallery into a passage way which detours into a theatre and then comes to an eddy of small photographs -- a gaily ascertained proposition/progress: world, proposal, projection, image. Concetto becomes the force behind design in a world that must be acted out. architecture becomes not simply a stage set but a character in a grand event proclaiming this present.

In this movement towards form it becomes clear that form does not disappear but rather that it is maintained in its an-exact opposite. oxymoron's flower.

X differences

the fugue rises up as the lyrical line unfolding differences differing in a perpetual rhythm of alternations. anamorphosis propels the viewer to actively track difference and in doing so finds that it spring up everywhere. pictures (memories) fold upon pictures (sensations), allegories upon allegories, and space springs up between spaces. the crumpled blue tape ball -- which perhaps is not quite crumpled -- the ways in which the sinuous yellow blob is perhaps not quite the philosophers stone we were awaiting -- which will we learn later unfolds again and moves from three dimensions into two and out again into a historic stage set of photography -- too much now not enough -- quiet discordances alight in laughter far from us





Rear-View Mirror: Press Release
January 11 – February 10, 2007

Michael Steinberg Fine Art is pleased to present Rear-View Mirror, a solo exhibition of new works by Amy Yoes. Including small-format black and white photographs, a stop-motion animation, and an installation with projections, this is her second show with the gallery.

A rear-view mirror allows one to look back while moving forward. Inspired by aspects of early modernism, in all its experimental variety, Yoes looks at ways of world-making and re-invention; and after years dedicated mostly to painting, she is returning to the multimedia environments of her early days. Each room of Rear-View Mirror has elements in common, but each offers different perspectives. Architectural and abstract forms combine to make environments that are otherworldly, yet rooted in sensitivity to urban paths of decay and regeneration. Materials are presented in the form of raw potential as well as fully crafted entities. Interpretation and experience change with each medium.

Amy Yoes grew up in Houston, Texas, and lived in Chicago, where she received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After several years in San Francisco, she settled in New York city in 1998. Room Tone, her first exhibition with Michael Steinberg Fine Art, in 2005, featured mostly paintings, and a retrospective sculpture; she has since shown installation/wall drawing works in Out of Bounds at Wave Hill, New York, curated by Jennifer McGregor, Zip at Artspace in New Haven, Connecticut, curated by Denise Markonish, Ex-Ode to the Corporeal Conversation, a collaborative project by J. Morgan Puett in Beach Lake, PA., and Site 92 at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn.

She is currently working on 50,000 Beds, a collaborative film project curated by Chris Doyle, which will be shown at three institutions in Connecticut: the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Real Art Ways in Hartford, and Artspace in New Haven. She is also working on an installation project for James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and an installation project for a new high school in the Bronx through the Percent for Art program.

Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-6pm.
For more information please call 212.924.5770 or email info@msfineart.net.





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