‘By means other than the known senses’
Basel Unlimited Curated Section, 2022.
With support from Vielmetter Los Angeles
"By Means Other Than the Known Senses," 2022
Paint skin, metal
226" x 120" x 126"
I titled this work before I made it, based on an intention, but "By means other than the known senses” has fully lived up to its namesake. The process of building this nearly 20’ tall sculpture required all of me all at once and yet couldn't happen more than one step at a time. Waves of obstacles rose towards me and I let them crash and break and reveal the path beneath them. That crashing and breaking is a method, a means other than the known senses, and something that I'm still investigating. Meanwhile, the work has emerged, breathing and humming with the light, flexing towards and away from space. It bends, twists, balances, reaches and sags. I’m elated by its agency to express itself without me.
About the work:
Pink, brown, rust and green, this vertically-reaching, architecturally-scaled sculpture is an historical object, wearing time and experience while standing in the present. The paint skin strewn about it ironically brings gravity to the metal, which otherwise feels light and buoyant. Ass uch, the work toggles between weightlessness and heft, teasing perception and intervening in the viewer’s experience physically, emotionally, and by means other than the known senses.Expanding on the work Yanko executed while at the Rubell Residency (Miami, FL, Spring2021)—three tornado-like metal forms built from a single shipping container—this organic composition (also built with a reclaimed shipping container) is an abstract expression of intuition; of the indescribable feeling linked to a gut reaction. For Yanko, sculpture is a phenomenological method, and this work is an impulse
Read more about the work on ArtNet and / or tune in for my episode with ArtNe't’s Art Angle Podcast: