She is a Verb

She is a Verb

2023 solo exhibition at Devals in collaboration with Salon 94

While Yanko’s mangled scraps of metal may locate her in the realm of sculpture, she chooses to see herself instead as a painter. In her hands, metal assumes the gestural quality of a paint stroke, seemingly weightless as it drips down walls or spurts across its base. She overlays these salvaged forms with her signature “paint-skins”—flat stretches of lush acrylic which, when dried, luxuriate over and between the crevices of their metallic frames.

Yanko drapes and bunches these skins like swaths of silk, their colors borrowed from the expansive range of distressed copper on which they rest. Brilliant hues of scarlet, tangerine, and magenta meet softer skins of lavender, mint, and moss green. Here, painting breaks free from the canvas and into our shared space.

Yanko has long been drawn to copper for what she considers its ease and grace, properties that allow her to manipulate the material according to her will. It is highly resistant to weathering and thermal changes, as evidenced in its ubiquity across the Paris skyline. Of the dozen or so essential minerals the human body relies on for maintaining health, copper is one of the more common elements. Some others call upon copper to possess healing properties so as to free us of negative energy and promote equilibrium. About her practice, Kennedy states, “This work is about oneness. It vibrates with life because it is imbued with it.”

- Excerpt from She is a verb press release. Read more about the show here.

In Kennedy’s words:

Copper’s a material I’ve always enjoyed for its ease and grace; it lets itself bend and age, wearing what it endures and absorbing time in the form of dings, dents, and patinas. It’ll carry marks of salmon pink that turn to dark brown and eventually, a spectrum of green.

Shortly after I received this copper, I was introduced to Kevin Young, Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He, who’s also a poet, author, essayist and editor, was one of the first to see the works I’d made with this copper and in response, offered me a name I hadn’t known: Lucille Clifton. It was love at first line, reading her poetry and at once feeling connected to her medium. Her 1993 poem, “won’t you celebrate with me” from Book of Light, struck so immediately, so deeply, at my perseverance to overcome:

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.