Humming on Life

 Humming on Life

2023 solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (New York)

“By employing paint skin and metal in ways that both transmute a bodily essence and reposition the weight of gravity, Kennedy Yanko wields materiality and abstraction with the possibility of intervening in the viewers’ perceptions...

In her new body of work, Yanko takes an approach to sculpture that reconnects it, and her, with painting. In recent years, the weathered paint and bruised patinas found on salvaged metal relics informed her palette for the paint skins. Now, the artist is introducing colors to the metal she finds. By painting the metal directly, underpainting, fire-cutting forms and compositions, and then crushing those new shapes, Yanko is expanding the definition of painting through her process.”

— Excerpt from Humming on Life press release. Read more about the show here.

In Kennedy’s words:

My work looks at the vastness and potential of bodily perception and aims to thwart learned or societally-informed associations that pre-color our thoughts and experiences. With that in mind, this series of sculpture represents a further investigation into the soma and sense data, and the possibility of intervening in our perceptions or consciousness. 

For this exhibition, I changed my approach and shifted my process. Historically, I’ve let the weathered paint and bruised patinas found on metal forms in salvage yards reveal my palette to me, and to guide the color of the paint skin. This time—after spending a few months painting on canvas again, moving my wrist—I brought color to the metal, “underpainting” its surface. I realize now that, for those few months, the canvas was my scratch pad where I was tinkering with pushing the curvature, depth and composition of the metal. During that time, I also meditated on richer colors—teals and greens, burnt oranges, peachy pinks and periwinkles—that I would later incorporate in this body of chrome-based work. I found myself joining colors in a way that I hadn’t since earlier on in my career, when I would create marbleized paint skins. 

I’ve always considered myself foremost a painter, but I think that has revealed itself differently with this sculpture, particularly with the way I’m layering processes; underpainting and then painting the metal, fire-cutting forms and compositions, and then crushing those new shapes. It’s felt more child-like and collage-like, and the shapes in combination with the colors remind me of Matisse’s cut-outs; I’ve more or less been “drawing with scissors,” as he said, or rather painting with scissors (and fire). 

Working this way has been labor-intensive and has exposed me to sounds, like water thrashing inside a metal tank while cleaning it. Feeling that thrashing—hearing a power that felt like infinity incarnate—encouraged me to probe water as a medium and examine more closely my intuitive method, one that seemingly only comes from physical exchange: input and output, expansion and contraction. In pulling water apart and becoming more curious about its behavior and participation, I’ve enjoyed revisiting the ways in which it's a web of activation, a source, and information. It’s a cue and a salve and carries with it tinges of what it’s gone through. 

But what water did for me in that moment was point back to the livingness of my medium — of the metal and paint skin I rely on — and wash away the binary between life and matter. Erasing this divide expands the possibility of experience; it gives materiality an abstract power that we yield to. It’s that vitality, found in color, form, attention and consciousness, that I hope this work can be a language for.