Hannah

HANNAH

2019 solo exhibition at Kavi Gupta Gallery

“…In preparation for HANNAH—her first solo show at Kavi Gupta—Yanko chose to engage in more of an open call and response with the pre-existing narratives of her materials.

Says Yanko, “It was a very different experience creating this show. It became about slowing down and taking more time to allow the conceptual aspects to develop as I manipulated and created each work. Initially, while searching for the base materials, I was drawn to metals that had direct characteristics related to their past lives. These markings appeared so perfectly I didn’t feel I had the agency to remove them.”

Rather than eliminating evidence of the past—which was about allowing viewers to stay more in the moment with her works—Yanko felt compelled to start incorporating the imposed history of her materials into their present forms.”

The works in HANNAH express this shift, retaining bits of text andaged, painted surfaces—echoes of their material past.

Additionally, Yanko began adding elements such as colored vinyl pieces to her sculptures, in an effort to expand the perspective of the work beyond the sculptures themselves.

“I was thinking about tracing the shadows of the work,” she says, “to bring in another element and perspective that provoked the viewer to read the pieces with a different kind of physical involve-ment. In addition to the metal and the paint skins, I chose blocks of monochromatic color to echo the highlights and lowlights of rust, expanding the work into the space.

— Excerpt from HANNAH press release. Read more about the show here.

In Kennedy’s words:

…I created an exhibition titled: HANNAH. It marked a turning point for me, materially, spatially, and internally.

For years, my instinct was to transform found objects until their pasts were no longer legible. But in this body of work, something resisted erasure. Certain scars, markings, and structural memories in the materials asked to remain. They weren’t asking to be resolved, only acknowledged.

Listening to that changed how I understood my own story.

HANNAH was a meditation on epigenetics and personal agency. The idea that while we inherit biological potentials and predispositions, epigenetics shows that gene expression can be altered by external and internal factors, and personal agency is our capacity to act intentionally and shape how those expressions play out in our lives. This research opened my thinking around how attitude, perception, and how will can alter the way matter organizes itself, whether biological or sculptural.

This exhibition was also an inquiry into expansion: what it means for a painting to leave the wall and enter the room. I traced the metal’s lines into extended shadows, which became extensions of the work, inviting the viewer into a physical relationship rather than a fixed vantage point. The framework supported the skin, and the skin responded to the framework. Each dependent on the other, each incomplete alone.