I have been revisiting works that lay dormant in my studio. These works may have been unresolved, or damaged, just hankering for some kind of redemption. Or they no longer pass muster for one reason or another. I find myself more interested in errors and defects than I ever was in the past. I re-work and reconfigure these works—destroying their original form, peeling layers off, breaking them into constituent parts. I find what was previously hidden from view. It is like taking apart a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and finding a portal inside it. Wrenching things apart leads to incidental marks, leaving the indexical residue of an action performed.

Back in 2004 I made a cast flexible resin sculpture called 68 by 12 (green). It hung on the wall and curled onto the floor. About 5 years later, after it was exhibited and entered a private collection, I was informed of two issues with the work: the green tint had faded away, and someone had stepped on the portion that extended onto the floor, damaging the work. After it was sent back to my studio, I noticed that the color on the front of the work had indeed faded (but not the color on the back which had been hidden from exposure to light) to a mere pale hint of green, as the particular tinting agent I had used was fugitive. Over a decade had passed, when I reapproached the damaged work this year. This fugitivity intrigued me. I peeled off the damaged bottom bit and it became a small work of its own. I transformed the main body of the damaged

work—playing with its flexible nature –into a newly reconfigured work, bearing little resemblance to the original. It is one configuration, among the many possible future incarnations. Where the bottom bit was torn away, the reflective polyester film encapsulated inside is now laid bare, with no protection—exposed and vulnerable.

– Carrie Yamaoka

Anonymous is pleased to present See-saw, an exhibition by Carrie Yamaoka, in association with Ulterior. The works installed range from the early 1990s to the present, tracing a conceptual and procedural thread across media and across time. In addition to revisited works, the exhibition includes works that serve as harbingers of trajectories of what would transpire and develop in the future.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Carrie Yamaoka is an interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges across painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. She is deeply engaged with the topography of surfaces, materiality and process, the tactility of the barely visible and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object. The work addresses the viewer at the intersection between records of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture emerging in fleeting and unstable states of transformation.

Yamaoka’s work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), MoMA PS1 (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Zilkha Gallery/Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Fondation Ricard (Paris), Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington (Seattle), Artists Space (New York), Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio), Participant Inc. (New York), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Grey Art Museum (New York), and MassMOCA (North Adams, Massachusetts). Writing on her work has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, The New Yorker, Time Out/NY, Hyperallergic, Interview, Ursula, and BOMB. Her work is included in the public collections of the Buffalo AKG, the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, Dallas Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, Sunpride Foundation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and an Anonymous Was A Woman award (2017). A monograph, RE: Carrie Yamaoka, will be published by Radius Books in July 2025. Yamaoka is represented by Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles), Kiang Malingue (Hong Kong/New York) and Ulterior (New York). Yamaoka is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy. She lives and works in New York City.