Carrie Yamaoka

SOCO Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by the New York based painter Carrie Yamaoka. Yamaoka will join SOCO Gallery for a public reception and celebration of The Space Between on Thursday, January 19th, from 6 to 8 PM. This will be the artist's first exhibition in North Carolina.

Carrie Yamaoka works in what the artist refers to as an expanded field of painting, utilizing unconventional materials including reflective silver mylar film and poured layers of resin, along with experimentally-developed tactile processes such as rubbing and the lifting off of pigment, to arrive at a remarkable exploration of topography marked by the intersection of chance and intention. The dazzlingly reflective surfaces of the completed paintings draw the viewer into their endless depths, while reflecting the constantly shifting physicality of both the viewer and the environment in which they are installed. As Roberta Smith of the New York Times perhaps best described it, “Ms. Yamaoka's sumptuous yet unassuming paintings constitute a kind of Situationist Minimalism. They are physically specific and implacable, yet so vague they can almost disappear, especially if you become involved with the blurry ways they reflect their surroundings.”

In Artforum Summer 2016, Yamaoka was quoted about the interaction with her work, “Some people do not like seeing themselves. Viewers will take up a position outside of the frame, uneasy. Or it can be just the opposite. Strange-- as what one sees is never a true facsimile (an impossibility), but an inflected, chewed-up approximation of what you might call a self. Never still for long, continually in motion, where the light falls, never the same way, I am caught in the process of becoming, and in the midst of disintegrating.”

Carrie Yamaoka (American, B. 1958)
Yamaoka has had solo exhibitions in London, Brussels, Zurich, and Amsterdam, as well as her most recent solo exhibition which took place at Lucien Terras in New York in September of 2015. Her work was featured in Greater New York 2015 at MoMA/PS1, October 2015 - March 2016. Yamaoka’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, L’Express, Time Out, Bomb, and The New Yorker, among other publications. The artist lives and works in New York.