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Emerging from a formative background in photography and fascinated by the camera's ability to record and inability to represent, Carrie Yamaoka explores processes of recording and transformation across painting, sculpture, and installation. The artist’s first monograph is a thoughtful examination of her cross-disciplinary practice over several decades.Yamaoka’s visually arresting, ground-breaking works reveal how materiality, temporality, and form connect, calling the viewer's attention to the topography of surfaces, the tactility of the barely visible, and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of an art object. This volume also strongly features her latest focus: a return to earlier works, taking them apart to create newly transformed, re-configured pieces. In Yamaoka’s words, “The liminal, the scarred, and the ephemeral are all laid bare.”
re: Carrie Yamaoka is designed and printed with a formal nod to the visual phenomena at play when encountering the artist’s work in person—the ways in which reflection, refraction, distortion, and the surrounding environment (including the viewer) become part of the compositional field. This in-depth study of the artist’s oeuvre is accompanied by texts from artists and scholars Jill H. Casid, Claire Grace, Josiah McElheny, and Jo-ey Tang, with a correspondence between Yamaoka and the art historian and critic Elisabeth Lebovici.
Yamaoka's work is included in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, and Centre Pompidou. She is also a founding member of fierce pussy, the queer art collective, alongside artists Nancy Brooks Brody (1962-2023), Joy Episalla and Zoe Leonard. The group continues to collaborate today.
List of contents
Texts:
1. "Epochs Become Infinite," Jo-ey Tang
2. "Other images," Josiah McElheny
3. "A Is For," Jill H. Casid
4. "A Stump's Scarf," Claire Grace
5. "Correspondence," Carrie Yamaoka/Elisabeth Lebovici
6. Chronology
About the author
Carrie Yamaoka (b. 1957, she/they) works at the intersection between records of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture emerging in fleeting and unstable states of transformation. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the ICA Philadelphia, MoMA PS1, Palais de Tokyo, Henry Art Gallery, Artists' Space, Centre Pompidou, Wexner Center for the Arts, Leslie Lohman Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, Fondation Ricard, and MassMOCA. Writing about her work has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, The New Yorker, Time Out/NY, Hyperallergic, Interview, and BOMB. Yamaoka is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and an Anonymous Was A Woman award (2017). She is represented by Commonwealth and Council, Ulterior, and Kiang Malingue. She lives and works in New York.
Artist-theorist and historian
Jill H. Casid (b. 1966) is Professor of Visual Studies in the Departments of Art History and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Casid researches across writing, photography, and film that is dedicated to queer, crip, trans*feminist, and decolonial interventions.
Claire Grace (b. 1979) is an art historian specializing in art from the 1960s to the present, primarily in US contexts, and with a particular focus on intersections between aesthetic practices and social and political intervention. She is currently a faculty member of the Art & Art History and American Studies Departments at Wesleyan University.
Elisabeth Lebovici (b. 1953) is a French art historian, journalist, and art critic. Her research examines gender and sexuality, and the relationships between feminism, queer theory, art history, and contemporary art. She has authored numerous monographic studies on contemporary artists and teaches at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.
Josiah McElheny (b. 1966) is an artist whose sculptures, paintings, installations, performances, and films engage with the history of ideas across literature, architecture, music theory, and astronomy. His works often combine glass or mirror with other materials, to emphasize the importance of the act of looking “as a subject in and of itself.” For McElheny, a skilled glassblower, the material serves as a productive agent, inciting chance encounters between forms and ideas that point toward alternative histories and futures.
Jo-ey Tang (b. 1978) is an artist, writer, and curator who experiments with the formats of versions, repetitions, and iterations as an ongoing engagement with time and its potential. He has curated exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and Blaffer Art Museum, Houston. He has served as Director at KADIST San Francisco and Curator at the Palais de Tokyo.
