'Chloé Yingst: Missing'
The artist's first solo show offers a series of ethereal portraits rooted in memory
Reviewed by Wayne Alan Brenner, Fri., Feb. 18, 2011
'Chloé Yingst: Missing'
Pump Project, 702 Shady Ln.
Through March 5
Spare and evocative, built of aqueous layers or precise (and often crimson) marks, many in a state of what seems deliberate and terminal incompletion: The watercolors and drawings
of Chloé Yingst's "Missing" haunt the Pump Project walls like ghosts of some personal, half-remembered past. But you don't have to grok that feeling of memory's wraiths from viewing the art up close – although that's a fine way to pass some time in this Eastside gallery. You can learn it from the artist's statement.
"This collection of drawings reflects who I am and where I am from through the exploration of memory. These images become snapshots of a broken narrative constructed out of two interwoven stories, my own present experiences reflected in simple drawings of quiet, everyday life and the romantic, mythologized courtship of my parents told through recollections and family photos. This collection investigates not only what is remembered, but what is not."
Understandable, then, the lacunae helping to define these rendered visions, the gradual loss of colors along a periphery, the faint blurs and drips of transparent paint when shadows or more are suggested. And fortunate, then, the generous spacing between these works at Pump Project, allowing the mind to briefly contemplate what's just been viewed, to form a faint memory, before the eyes are introduced to a new framed vista of fabrication.
This is the artist's first solo show, a position won by taking first place in the Eyes Got It! open-call competition, judged by Okay Mountain's Sterling Allen, Women & Their Work's Rachel Koper, and Risa Puleo of the Blanton Museum of Art, in November last year. This initial offering provides a background, you could imagine, a past for the future of works yet to come from Yingst. This initial offering provides a background – or it provides, simply, a series of ethereal landscapes and portraits for your perusal. "Simply," though, is a suspicious word, especially among the mined recollections in a show called "Missing."
Of course: "Fact is one thing," the artist says, "significance another."
Both can be found, depending upon the memories in your own mind's eye, within this exhibition of Yingst's newest works.
