Past Exhibition

Amy Yoes

Light Lab

September 11 – October 22, 2011
Artist Reception: Sunday, September 11, 5 – 7 p.m.

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CB1 Gallery is proud to present Amy Yoes’s first project in Los Angeles, Light Lab, which expands the scope and scale of her previous site-specific installations. The exhibition will be on view from Sunday, September 11 through Sunday, October 16, 2011. An opening reception for the artist will take place on Sunday, September 11, 2011, 5 – 7 p.m.

The cathedral-like space of CB1 Gallery, a former bank lobby, becomes host to a geometric structure built along a quasi-organic logic. Lit voids and constructed forms emerge out of the universal language of building: bracket, ramp, tower. The structure’s electric glow is both vernacular sign and illuminated dream. Painted surfaces of black, white, and grey accentuate the relationship between components and viewer sightlines, simultaneously disrupting spatial expectations.

In the front room, small black-and-white silver gelatin prints depict similar situations. A narrative thread of spatial conundrums speaks of the psychological space of rooms and places of uncertain origin. Past becomes present through the act of looking, while the ambiguity of scale plays up the intertwining of fact and fiction. In the metaphorical space of Light Lab, the individual images are isolated as markers in time, mediated moments dictated by celestial bodies.

Much of Yoes’s work has explored the language of ornament, architecture, and the flux of the urban environment. In recent years, her investigations have centered on the geometric language of modernist and constructivist perspectives. Lineages and hierarchies morph into ideas that are new but retain some of the DNA of the original. The ongoing flow of historical alignments and social conduits illuminates new readings of style. References ricochet in a viewer’s mind, each unique and personal. The work is as much about what it does as about what it is.

Amy Yoes was born in 1959 and is based in New York, where she works in sculpture, installation, video, photography, and painting. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been exhibited at venues such as the Box at the Wexner Center for the Arts; Colorado State University Art Museum; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; the Cranbrook Art Museum; Artspace; and Art in General, among others. She is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Award and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. In the spring of 2011 she spent three months at AIR Krems, a residency in Krems, Austria. She will return to Austria this December for a sculptural installation project curated by David Komary at the Galerie Stadtpark, Krems.

Amy Yoes would like to thank expert fabricator and artist James Harmon for all of his work on Light Lab. Special thanks also to artist/builder Paul Bartow.

Artist's Website