Moving Weight

 Moving Weight

2022 two-person exhibition with Hilma af Klint at CF Hill

“With these new sculptures, Yanko intends her biomorphic curves and specific hues to be in dialogue with the organic geometries and distinctive color schemes of af Klint’s paintings. In one of Yanko’s wall-works, for instance, a vibrant orange paint skin twists through a mossy green assemblage, its pinwheeling shapes rhyming with af Klint’s favored spiral forms. In another, a terracotta paint skin envelopes a chunk of barley brown metal with a lemony yellow pop at its center; the piece, whose contours resemble the petals of a gargantuan flower, loosely resonates with af Klint’s “Tree of Knowledge” series. Color similarly ricochets across two and three dimensions in other equally muscular works, as in a piece in which a pea-soup green bowtie snakes through a metal-knot of marine blue, or in another in which a sky-blue paint skin cascades from on high, spilling out from a sage green, diamond-shaped, steel skeleton…

The partnering of these two distinct materials—metal and latex paint—reflects what Yanko describes as “a call-and-response” relay in which one “comments” on the other. Working with, and sometimes against gravity, Yanko engineers each element separately before integrating one into the other. In this way, she establishes a yin-yang balance between a handful of contrasting qualities—hard and soft, rough and smooth, polished and matte—that the metal and the paint alternately possess. At times, intricate maneuvers are required to grapple with, in her words, “the dance and the wrestle” of her materials. Indeed, her works’ creation has an almost performative element, as she calibrates the scale of her sculptures to the viewing body.”

— Excerpt from Debra Singer’s essay The Dance and the Wrestle. Read the full text here.

In Kennedy’s words:

I first met Hilma in writing. She shared a blueprint of her experience as an abstract expressionist that offered me a foothold to build upon. I’ve always been a diarist, and only in recent past did I quite realize how much material is lodged in my own entries—my own blueprints—both reflections, and very accurate predictions. At one point I’d written that I’d like to be in conversation with Hilma af Klint: the artist, the archivist, the mind, the vessel. If my work can serve as footnotes to hers, I hope the extended text provides another dimension through which the importance of abstraction as an intuitive tool may be understood. 

Hilma’s language is not obvious, but it’s orchestrated; each color has a specific meaning that, when introduced to another color, becomes a formula for an outcome: inception. My colors are less about information and more about gut reactions. In selecting palettes, my body leads: expansion = yes, contraction = no. Intuiting the feeling of color, when we’re taught to prioritize the logical and override internal cues, requires daily, physical, and ritualistic work. It’s through that repeated effort and excavation that transmutation becomes possible; that the artist can imbue something ephemeral or metaphysical in the art. 

When I started working on this show, I was tracing Hilma’s hand; I was looking at similarities in the way we move and in our fascination with polar spaces—her yellow and blue, my paint skin and metal. As I got deeper into the process, I began to see how my colors were expanding on hers, elaborating on an elusive undercurrent guiding shapes, forms, lightness and gravity. What I’m realizing now, is that Hilma and I are joined in our approach to abstraction; in letting it be the glue in the cracks of language and knowing.”