Knitty Griddy
Oc tober 25 – December 6, 2018
James Yakimicki
All artwork Š James Yakimicki unless otherwise noted. Catalogue design by Shona Masarin-Hurst. 1
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
STAFF
ADVISORY COUNCIL
Kate Buchanan
Executive Director
Katie Cercone
Theodore S. Berger Vernon Church Marcy Cohen
Thomas G. Devine Thomas K.Y. Hsu
Steffani Jemison
Corina Larkin
Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director
Shona Masarin-Hurst Programs Director
John S. Kiely
Eva Elmore
Lionel Leventhal
Lilly Hern-Fondation
Vivian Kuan
Rachel Maniatis
Christen Martosella Aliza Nisenbaum Kyle Sheahen
Brian D. Starer Lilly Wei
Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus
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Development Coordinator Programs Assistant
Polly Apfelbaum Lynn Crawford Ian Cooper
Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney
Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass
Sharon Lockhart Juan Sรกnchez Lilly Wei
Andrea Zittel
Irving Sandler (in memoriam)
CUE Art Foundation is a visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for artists of all ages. Through exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists, writers, and audiences with sustaining, meaningful experiences and resources. CUE’s exhibition program aims to present new and exceptionally strong work by under-recognized and emerging artists based in the United States, and is committed to exhibiting work of all disciplines from living artists. Exhibiting artists are selected via a hybrid process, featuring solo exhibitions curated by established artists, alongside a series of solo and group exhibitions selected by an annual Open Call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, curators and Open Call panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing their exhibition. We are honored to work with artist Gregory Amenoff as the curator of this exhibition.
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Knitty Griddy
James Yakimicki
To the Fall of 2018, The mis-organized pockets of pigmented territory presented here are perhaps a “wabi-sabi” of the past within our presence. Ascending and descending into durational feedback from infinite locale, emerging from a “flat depth” of submerged repetition undulating with a removal-like rhythm of haptic knots in motion, the mind presses into fluid surface with dormant awareness: stained with age, swiftly divided into capture, in harmonious pursuit of a vibrant uncertainty in wide zoom. (Addition By Erasure) As daily applications of transparent growth and opaque erosion activate by sequential orchestration, refined marks align with the microbial pulsation beyond our didactic illuminated devices; an instantaneous correspondence on invisible pace of unequivocal innovation seemingly calibrated with mere disposable consideration of consequence for the marketed depths within our individual entity. (Password Incorrect) Sincerely, Jimmy Yakimicki
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James Yakimicki was born in Beech Grove, Indiana in 1980. Since an early age he describes the classroom as being a “mystical escape� from the maelstrom of Midwestern suburbia concluding the 20th century in North America. A scrappy kid with perfect attendance, bad grades and an inquisitively expressive resistance to academic structure, painting and drawing have always been essential elements for processing auditory information. His improvised approach is rooted in the erasure of lecture notes rearranged into aerial, map-like mazes and blending vertical blue-lined pages of math and cursive handwriting exercises into multi-leveled landscapes.
roads instantly became a new classroom of ancient rediscovery. For several years that followed, the sitespecific experiences of hiking, skiing, studying, and driving hundreds of thousands of miles throughout the rocky terrain unified body with mind into his dancing marks amidst a contemplative patina. Merging his scattered passions for the liberal arts with the continuum of oil painting, Yakimicki earned a BFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder (2007) and an MFA from Columbia University in the City of New York (2012). He currently maintains studios in Colorado, Indiana, and New York City.
At the dawn of a new era, the Spring of 2002, Yakimicki left on a road trip to Colorado, a destination he had only admired in library books, magazines, and television. The crumbling mountains and twisting river
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Gregory Amenoff Curator-Mentor
I am more than pleased to have the opportunity to curate this exhibition of James Yakimicki—a painter possessing a provocative and original vision. As I have retired as a founding member of CUE’s board, I am now able to participate in fulfilling the central tenant of CUE’s mission: to create a ‘sea change’ in the professional life of a deserving and under-recognized artist. I want to thank Executive Director Corina Larkin and Programs Director Shona Masarin-Hurst for their guidance in this endeavor. Additionally, I want to recognize the insightful essay accompanying this catalogue, crafted by Amanda York.
James Yakimicki is an intense and passionate creator of worlds—worlds that are complete and self-contained, yet are by no means eccentric and solipsistic. Instead his narratives, constructed with short ‘woven’ gestures, are fully connected to our human longings, failures, fears, politics, and hopes. To my eye Yakimicki’s work finds familial resonance both in content and form with the low country masterpieces of the 16th century paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who both celebrated and satirized the human condition. Specifically, one of Bruegel’s
Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Tower of Babel (1563) Oil on wood, 45 x 61 x 1.5 inches Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna ©KHM-Museumsverband, sourced from www.khm.at/de/object/bc6dc48b74/
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two depictions of the Tower of Babel come to mind in which the crumbling walls and floors of the tower create a pattern very much like the patterns found in much of Yakimicki’s imagery. Beyond the formal visual kinship between the two, like Bruegel, Yakimicki’s paintings offer metaphors for our plight. In much of Yakimicki’s work the narratives are both entertaining and often somewhat foreboding. As Amanda York noted in her essay, his paintings are “fusions of landscapes omitting horizon lines.” Without a horizon, there is no place to go to—no place to look to—nor any escape to a better (or any) world. They are landscape mazes that contain both humor and tragedy for those caught in their ‘web.’ How refreshing indeed it is to experience paintings that are at once of our time and also find commonality with work completed 500 years ago. James Yakimicki is in many respects a journalist in the most elevated sense of that calling. He paints the world as he sees it with all its warts and beauty. His work is always moving to new territory powered by an unstoppable curiosity, imagination and an ‘itchy’ hand.
Gregory Amenoff is a painter who lives in New York City and Ulster County, New York. He is the recipient of numerous awards from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the Tiffany Foundation, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011. He has had over fifty one-person exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. His work is in the permanent collections of more than thirty museums, including the Whitney Museum of America Art, MoMA, and the Met. He served as President of the National Academy of Design from 2001-2005. He is a founding board member of the CUE Art Foundation and served as the CUE Art Foundation's Curator Governor from 2002 to 2015. Amenoff has taught at Columbia for more than twenty years, where he holds the Eve and Herman Gelman Chair of Visual Arts and was Chair of the Visual Arts Division from 2007-2013.
I, for one, anxiously await what will come tomorrow and way down the line. P.S. Check out the titles. They are mini novellas.
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Manhattan Projection (Prentis Hall), 2010 Oil on canvas 144 x 86 inches
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Torque (Wedgeway Court), 2011 Oil on canvas 84 x 96 inches
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LEFT Hot Dry Lust, 2017 Oil on linen 82 x 78 inches
RIGHT Basillica Crumbles, 2012 Oil on canvas 72 x 58 inches
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Whirled, 2009 Oil on canvas 132 x 72 inches
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rOilTea - A Momentous Erosion of Improvised Rhythms, 2012 Oil on linen 86 x 112 inches
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Momentum, 2007 Oil on canvas 74 x 84 inches
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The Score Was Tide (1:1) , 2015 Oil on linen 72 x 112 inches
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Lolita's in Four Wheel Drive, 2013 Oil on linen 60 x 72 inches
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LEFT Concerto #84, 2018 Pen and marker on Arches hot pressed satin paper 10 x 10 inches RIGHT Pour, 2016 Ink pen on Arches hot pressed satin paper 10 x 7 inches
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On Place: Physical, Imagined, Technological Amanda York
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James Yakimicki’s paintings and drawings are fusions of landscapes omitting horizon lines, scale, and perspective in favor of aerial views and multiple vanishing points. His experiences living on the flat planes of central Indiana, the altitudinal heights of Boulder, Colorado, and the urban sprawl of New York City are incorporated into all of his works, which do not represent one place or event, but are conflations of many over time. Yakimicki introduces dreamlike elements into these environments, such as celestial formations or floating objects, and the result is alternately euphoric or nightmarish. Technology figures into his work as large mechanical assemblages, and his godlike vantage points allude to modern surveillance capabilities.
colors are populated by gesturally rendered lines representing figures. At times these figures chaotically inhabit their environment by spreading in many directions on nearly every surface of the canvas, and at other times they serenely fade into the background. Any identifiers have been omitted. They appear without facial features, grouped in matching robes that allude to unknown affiliations, perhaps religious, scholarly, militaristic, or even athletic. His landscapes often include architectural elements of Yakimicki’s design, from scaffolding to the shells of formerly grand palaces. Sometimes subtly delineated sets of stairs recede into his paintings, and their multiple vanishing points further establish these compositions as representations detached from a singular reality.
Ranging in scale from about three feet across to expansive wall-sized compositions, Yakimicki’s paintings begin with intuitively applied washes of color arranged layer upon layer, as if naturally occurring sedimentary geological formations. His spontaneous underpainting is a time-intensive, additive process leading him to question when a work is “finished,” a fluidity that is well-suited to his dizzying fusions of place, time, and perspective. His swaths of muted
Yakimicki’s paintings lack negative space. Nearly every surface is filled with a cacophony of landforms, architecture, objects, or figures that together offer little guidance to the viewer about where to look. He uses this strategy of visual overstimulation as a way to portray his own psychological state, saying that his “impulses [and resultant marks] are raw emotion stemming from paranoia, worry, love, fear, and confusion,” and, rather than distilling these sensations,
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he simultaneously lays them bare on the canvas. Yakimicki is quick to say that he aims to prompt an emotional response in his viewers; his intensity is balanced by this freedom to explore without moralism or conclusion. His palette, the degree to which his scenes are populated, and the built environment alternately evoke feelings of tranquility, foreboding, gloom, or exuberance. Yakimicki cites the work of painters Roberto Matta and Joan Mitchell as artistic influences. His paintings share in common Matta’s indeterminate environments inhabited by hybrid figures and Mitchell’s allover gestural expressionism. Another source of inspiration is the elevated visual perspective found in traditional Thai mural paintings, which Yakimicki viewed while on residency in Bangkok in 2014. Buddhist mandalas figure into his thinking as well; the endurance-based creation of Tibetan sand mandalas and the cosmology contained within them are both linked to his practice. The theme of technology figures prominently in Yakimicki’s production. Machinery appears futuristic, but also with a patina, like a dystopic Sci-Fi film. It is a physical presence in his work in addition to a symbol
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for the inescapable “confines of capitalism” (in the artist’s words) with its attendant waste, violence, and class suppression. His invented devices are not specific or representational, but loom over the scene as an unrecognizable specter. In Manhattan Projection (Prentis Hall), a large machine with several arms ominously stretches across the composition, hovering like a low flying satellite [page 8]. Yakimicki’s studio was located in Prentis Hall as a graduate student at Columbia University, and the piece references both his own experience and the Manhattan Project research that was conducted at the University. Today, we know the ramifications of this research, the atrocities it caused during WWII, and the continuing threat of nuclear warfare. The word, “project,” is smartly extended to “projection” in the work’s title, alternately alluding to a prediction for the future, the transference of an image onto another surface, and the physical manifestation of a state of mind. Yakimicki states that by “utilizing modern drone technology as a tool for the updated discovery of land features…I portray an array of aerial pockets and viewpoints throughout my work which are in unison with the intimate perspective I have developed
rOilTea, 2011 Oil on canvas 84 x 84 inches
since being a student in the elevations of Colorado.� He blends his personal experience of observing landscape from mountains with the perspectives that drones and satellites have made widely available. Additionally, he believes that each of his monkish lines of figures could actually be the activity of a single figure whose movements are tracked in space by devices in real time. This is a distinction he does not seek to clarify, but rather prefers to keep ambiguous. Attuned to overlaps of perspective and mood in everyday life, in some works, such as rOilTea, Yakimicki renders three-dimensional forms on the very surface of the canvas, a compositional strategy meant to
conjure the reflections cast on large storefront windows in New York City [page 29]. In these instances, as in reality, it can be unclear if the image is a reflection on the glass, objects arranged in a display, or the interior of the building beyond. As if a reflection, entangled parts resembling gears and windmills appear on the surface of rOilTea, and a red clay landscape stretches far into the distance. The painting Lolita’s in Four Wheel Drive was prompted by a coffee shop Yakimicki frequented while an undergraduate student in Boulder, Colorado, which was fresh and clean at sunrise, but by the early morning hours it had become a party scene, and the cycle was soon restarted. Yakimicki found these contrasts jarring, as
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one location quickly transformed from an environment of study by morning to one of debauchery late into the evening [page 23]. Drawing is a large part of Yakimicki’s practice, and he creates small, diaristic works with colored pen and marker on paper. Often, they are titled according to the date and location that inspired them, along with personal observations of the day. As such, they are more specifically located than the amalgamated landscapes of his paintings. Yet the drawings, too, are typically created using an aerial perspective. Many are inspired by his former studio and apartment on St. Mark’s Place in New York City, and nearby Washington Square Park [page 24]. Viewers familiar with the park will recognize curved lines that allude to the central fountain lined by occupied benches. In his cityscapes, activity is abundant, and some forms resemble the park’s ever-present musicians and performers. Yakimicki's periodic drawings of Midwestern landscapes are often less heavily peopled, but instead contain areas delineated by differing textures of foliage, bodies of water, or rigid suburban fencing [page 25].
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The familiar is abstracted and rendered disorienting, as landforms and figures are eerily recognizable, yet identities and relationships remain unclear. Simultaneous depictions of strong and conflicting emotions ring true at a time of shifting political climates, threats of violence, unchecked capitalism, and obtrusive technology. Yakimicki finds uncertainty to be an apt description of our current environment. His works are personal, yet universal, as open-ended and purposefully unresolved as life itself, becoming psychological portraits of the physical, imagined, and technological landscapes that we inhabit daily. 1 This essay was informed by a studio visit conducted with the artist on May 26, 2018.
2 Email to the author on August 1, 2018. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.
5 James Yackimicki, “Artist Statement,” Rema Hort Mann Foundation. http://www.remahortmannfoundation.org/ project/jimmy-yakimicki/, accessed May 26, 2018.
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. Amanda York has curated the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Agnieszka Kurant, and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, among numerous other solo and group exhibitions. Her writing has been published in the exhibition catalogues Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940–1978 (New York: Americas Society, 2015) and Graphite (Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2013). She received an MA in art history from Hunter College in New York City, and has held positions at the Americas Society, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Savannah College of Art and Design. Mentor Charmaine Picard is an art historian, curator, and editor trained at the University of Chicago. She recently edited, Finding Beauty, Demanding Equity: An African American Life in Art. The Collections of Peggy Cooper Cafritz, published by Rizzoli Electa in February 2018. She is also the editor of a monograph on Cuban artist Yoan Capote published by Skira in 2016. She writes about modern and contemporary art for publications including ArtReview, The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction and Art in America. She is a former associate editor at The Art Newspaper and her curatorial experience includes positions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.
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CUE Art Foundation's programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals.
MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Anholt Services (USA) Inc. CAF American Donor Fund Compass Group Management LLC Compass Diversified Holdings Lenore Malen and Mark Nelkin The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation New York State Council on the Arts with the support of
Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts
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