“The features of a writer’s face / The body as location. A surface. Her skin. Her inks. His “I imagine she imagines insects.” The body as photograph the body in light the writing lost in light. The body by definition. The cutting that is the body as elision. The body as deletion.” -Steve McCaffery “Panopticon” 1984
In his first solo exhibition, Mike Yaniro presents a new body of work that utilize materials from commercial signage, images culled from scientific textbooks and the artist’s own image bank. He manually reproduces, sequences, and contextualizes text and image, suggesting and displacing narratives and representations by creating dysfunctional vehicles of information interwoven with corporeal imagery. These works are monuments to language and expression, slowed by the stillness requisite of the artistic process and represented in clinical isolation. Close examination reveals a meticulous and present hand, a record of a meditative act.
What these works recall are those heightened moments of consciousness when we are able to slow down enough to observe the previously overlooked: the proximity of our eyes to our nose, the callous of our palms, and the unnatural, yet familiar, color of sign panels telling us where to go or where not go. Therein we find ourselves confronting the materiality of language; our perception decelerates enough to dissect its inner parts, without losing the ability to make associations. -JJ Manford 10/19/13
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