Epithets

 EPithets, 2025

Solo exhibition, James Cohan Gallery, NY

“Steeped in modernist visual languages—from Abstract Expressionism to Arte Povera—Yanko’s works occupy the generative space between abstraction and figuration, the surreal and the earthbound. Precisely calibrated interplays between soft and hard elements, between found materials and constructed components, establish a unique visual syntax that speaks to both sculptural traditions and painterly concerns. Yanko’s sculptures embody expressive gestures—their folds and curves perform as brushstrokes or voluminous pours made solid, transforming the ephemeral movement of the painter’s hand into permanent spatial configurations. In pieces such as Lost lagoon, 2024 and Church hat, 2024, color becomes form itself—an actualization of chromatic ideas through deftly manipulated skins of paint. The vibrating hues on contorted, folded steel and painted surfaces reference both contemporary industrial products and the luminous colors employed by 20th-century masters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, and Anne Truitt…”

- Excerpt from Epithets press release. Read more about the show here.

The avant-garde is never anything but the progressive, emancipated form of past culture.

-Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973)

It is exhausting to exist within a culture completely incapable of suffering. As trans activist Elle Moxley states on the Institute of Black Imagination podcast, “I had always experienced pain, but I didn’t know how to be IN it.” In “Epithets,” Kennedy Yanko provides a window into what becomes possible when we reorient our relationship to sufering from active avoidance into surrender.

Industry requires order, order requires violence, and violence begets death. From this transitive order of equalities, industry ontologically is a necrophilic pursuit; blinded by the lust to control, manipulate, and predict, it foolishly confuses death with stasis.

But the world is alive.

What does it mean to embrace your trauma as scafolding, as an adaptive reuse industrial design intervention? For Yanko, death is foundational. Darkness is fundamental to the process. Her work articulates itself:

“I will take your industry, I will take your scientifc methods, I will take your mastery of the law, and with the sheer brute force of spirit, I will fashion a cocoon for my softness, my shadow, and my completeness—using the very tools designed to control/kill.

This is the dao, the equalizing force, the dance of transformation: your need for control is merely the sturdy foil against which my becoming is defned, refned, and restored. Thank you, actually, for being so fucking rigid. So stif. So cold—an impenetrable shell that now provides shelter and structure to the inefability of my existence.”

Like Kennedy Yanko’s sculptural practice that transforms industrial scrap metal into fluid forms that seem to defy their origins, we might reimagine the architectural blueprints of language itself—technical specifications dissolving into poetic expression, designed systems becoming platforms for authentic articulation.

- Excerpt from Dario Calabrese’s text, Kennedy Yanko: Epithets. Read the full text here.

Installation images of Epithets. Photos by: Phoebed'Heurle, 2025.