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 “Ghosts Don't Wear Watches”.
October 30, 2024 - January 10, 2025
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 ofmysterious white fluid pours out into its basin and back up the intake tube, in a continuous self-replenishing cycle.