Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Will Yackulic, Vanishing Made Easy, an exhibition of drawings, paintings and one sculpture. This is the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Yackulic's new work explores the phenomenology of the color silver, presenting a world rendered contradictory by surfaces incongruous with the objects they represent.
A nocturnal mood prevails, evoking that time in the night when one is half awake and half dreaming, a moment of vertiginous interchange between reality and illusion. That is, a time when things could just as easily appear as disappear.
Polygonal canvases in silver and black capture these transitional moments with mirror-like surfaces made with palladium leaf, mixed with screen-printed and inkjet print images of aluminum foil. The materials and processes tell the same story from different angles, confounding perception through multiple viewpoints.
Drawings are typed, painted and singed. Burnt holes literally reveal the illusory nature of the image as in Foil / Plotting (scorched). Orbs and cubes appear three dimensional but float on flat surfaces. A small multifaceted iron sculpture telescopes from the floor via a pedestal coated in graphite and palladium leaf.
The variety of materials used suggests a kind of alchemy, but the specific shapes and motifs exist in a precarious balance. Building on architectural and topographical imagery found in earlier work, cubes and spheres seem to have multiplied and changed course.
In the painting Doppelganger Inversion Lozenge two orbs resembling eyes or headlights sit strangely level in an otherwise disoriented space. The differentiation of their surfaces suggests a likeness obscured by reflection, or being caught in an eclipse. It is a mysterious image, intimate in scale but vast in scope.
Will Yackulic has had solo exhibitions at Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and internationally, including Art On Paper 2008, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina. His work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and has been reviewed in Artforum, Art on Paper, Flash Art, Modern Painters, Art Papers, The Village Voice and other publications. He received his BFA in Painting from the State University of New York, Purchase. Yackulic lives and works in New York.