Discover Top Posts Tagged with #mm yu

MM Yu https://www.flickr.com/photos/mmyu

Inventory

MM Yu's photographs capture the reality of desire's supply and demand through the management of merchandise into patterns of abstraction. What is presented is a set of images juxtaposed against each other to produce meaning that invites the viewer to make connections about material culture towards a multiplicity of interpretations, that constructs a matrix of wanted goods, fantastic ideals, and real needs. Confined within the sanctuary of a four-walled universe are chance elements that when strewn altogether produce a perfect beauty arresting in its chaos. Similarly the laws of commerce apply the same invisible scheme: everything is apparently beautiful when prosperity courses through the grids that control the flows of desire, but terrifying on the other hand when realization dawns to reveal that desire is emptiness and its multiplicity a marker of capitalist casualty. Regulating this energy into codes that translate into control facilitating the rates of exchange, which form into patterns of appearance and disappearance caused by the tides of supply and demand, dictate ultimately the inventory of goods that are displayed like carcass frozen to the gaze. This desire by design colors the whole field, intensified on larger territories to monopolize, while depressed on certain minor areas. Such a procession of floating signifiers, spectral emanations of things without use of yet, questions the role of photography as objective witness, as a machine apparently incapable of desire, which puts the role of the author back from hiding behind the device into the forefront of art making once more -an awareness that brings "color", i.e. life, to the practice of photography. In MM Yu’s practice, the author-as-artist-photographer returns to frame the stillness of life into a discourse of material exchange, at the same time bearing witness on the secret life of things.

#MM Yu

black 2008

feb 16-mar 6 2008 MM Yu Magnet katipunan Black, the color of objects that do not reflect light in any part of the visible spectrum, becomes the overriding theme of MM Yu's one-woman exhibition of recent enamel paintings on canvas at Mag:net Gallery. While this concern is admittedly not new to the art world--exploring the properties and symbolic value of black pigment have been pursued by contemporary artists from as early as the 1950s, as Ad Reinhardt's matte black color fields on square canvases or Robert Rauschenberg's textured black paintings demonstrate-MM Yu's exhibition is a refreshing take to the topic as it explores two central concerns by the artist: the transition of pigments from her previous paintings and the chronicling of gravity's effects on pigment. Experimenting with how colors can 'trap'--or be trapped-by varying degrees of black, Yu deliberately diminishes the use of the bright, luminescent pigments and hues that have characterized her previous photoworks and drip paintings. Instead, the artist layers her previous palette, which included bright, primary colors and pastels, with paint mixed with differing amounts of black pigments or with mixed pigments that eventually end up approximating the light-absorbing effects of 'blackness'. Despite the seeming differences on the surface between the colors of her past works and the paintings in the current show, the exhibition puts forward the concept that Yu's previous palettes of predominantly bright colors, if combined in appropriate proportions with each other, will eventually produce hues that would fit into the approximate definition of 'black'. The use of enamel as a medium also complements the purpose of delineating and documenting the process of mixing colors: subtly capturing the viscous swirls and flows of movement prior to merging. Black also explores another dimension to Yu's aesthetic concern with gravity, first demonstrated in the 'drip paintings' the artist has produced since 2002. In her previous works, Yu literally chronicles how dripping paint 'travels' or meanders down in lines from the top of her canvases. In this show, however, Yu creates patterns of pigment by randomly spilling small amounts of paint one after the other on her canvases, which are laid flat on the floor or tilted slightly to the side. In contrast to her drip painting series, which testify to the movement of paint as it is pulled downward by the force of gravity, the paintings in Black chronicle the end point or the result of these deliberate, intentional spillages as seen from above: hundreds of overlapping and irregularly-shaped forms creating a type of textured camouflage on canvas. http://www.magnetgalleries.com/exhibits.php?this_id=1

#black #mm yu