Consisting of a single, painted, steel form set atop a plinth and conjoined with a playfully ruckled paint skin, Large Shank I is a profoundly elegant expression of Kennedy Yanko’s abstract visual language. Yanko deploys her materials in ways that initiate poetic conversations between the heavily bodied metals and the soft, monochromatic paint skins. The soft elements seem to inhabit the hard. Or are the hard parts protecting the soft? Beyond such atomic dualities, what’s most important to Yanko is the interplay of light and shadow in the work—the parts that are visible on the surface, versus the unnoticed spaces between the layers. The shadows challenge the idea of seeing, or of eyes being the only way to take in knowledge.

“The framework supports the skin,” Yanko says, “and the metal becomes the composition that the skin responds to. There’s this play on how they interact and respond to each other. I’m fascinated with paradox, and seeming opposites, when actually they are so dependent on each other. I’m interested in the moment when they come together in that interdependence.”