Yuli Yamagata: Ghosts Don't Wear Watches

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce the Brazilian artist Yuli Yamagata’s (b.1989,
São Paulo) third solo exhibition in New York. The artist’s latest exhibition, her most
ambitious to date, features new fabric paintings, ikebana and mixed media sculptures
(including a motorcycle, a mobile, and a fountain), functional chairs and stools, and her
first ever video work entitled Frooty Looping Serial Death. United by the principle of
cycles, this new body of work offers a meditation on the ephemeral and the eternal. 

Yamagata’s choice of materials offers visitors sensory pleasures and bracing
confrontations. Poly-fil-stuffed Lycra creates the undulating surfaces of her fabric
paintings; organics and synthetics intermix forming objects that evoke atavistic
memories. Her mixed media sculptures express various ways in which the body
consumes and interacts with everyday objects. Simulated corn, pizza, and spaghetti
represent nourishment; telephones, keyboards, and acupressure boards remind us of
tactile feedback. The body - both animal and human - is referenced in her use of sun-
bleached bones, seashells and pods, cast limbs, and shiny pools of resin resembling
bodily fluids. 

Through hyperbolic use of food and body parts in her sculptures, these amalgamated
forms become sympathetic characters, their positioning and colors evoking anxiety,
anger, excitement and loneliness. Her visual language embraces decay, balances
horror with humor, and animates inanimate objects. Mixing references and philosophies
from Western and Eastern cultures; from SpongeBob SquarePants, a 15th century
fresco, and H.R. Giger, to Manga, Kishontenketsu and Butoh, the results reflect a
thoroughly contemporary hybridity. 

The centerpiece of the exhibition is her seven-minute video Frooty Looping Serial
Death, a spiraling story within a story, which alternates between the waking and dream
states of a snail. Yamagata’s storytelling combines handmade puppets and props with
human actors, her own pets, and stop animation to create a maelstrom of Freudian
imagery. The artist has conceived of the story to be circular, with no clear beginning and
end, therefore, each visitor’s experience will differ, depending on at which point they
enter the installation.

Yamagata’s works steer our focus away from the realm of human drama and towards
the natural world, embracing processes that are inevitable. Self-Digestion Fountain, a
fiberglass and polyester resin fountain positioned at the entrance to the gallery, is a
foundational piece for the exhibition. It is metaphoric ouroboros, a cascade of
mysterious white fluid pours out into its basin and back up the intake tube, in a
continuous self-replenishing cycle.