Kennedy Yanko USA, b. 1988

This work by Kennedy Yanko was made for the Kabinett sector of Art Basel Miami Beach 2021, as part of Kavi Gupta's presentation.

The work reflects breakthroughs Yanko made during her 2021 residency with the Rubell Museum of Art in Miami. Going into that residency, Yanko had been working with her signature mix of found metal and poured paint skins for 12 years. As an experienced welder, Yanko was always very comfortable working with metal. She felt like she was in a give and take relationship with the material, where she could understand the history of the pieces she found and respect that, while still exerting her will on the form. Her relationship with the paint skins tended to be more intuitive. The give and take was not with an existing form, but with the material itself, which interacts in unpredictable ways when introduced to the metal forms.

During the Rubell residency, Yanko entered a new phase of her relationship with her paint skins, one which centers the essential nature of the liquid medium—organic movement.

Her installation for Kabinett consists of two metal pieces, one smaller than the other. Yanko describes them as siblings. Each has black paint skins crawling on them. Like black radionuclide dye in a bone cancer scan, the black paint seems to be stabile and mobile at the same time; an organic, evolving element within the work.

The installation also represents an expansion of Yanko’s interest in shadows and space. She first visited the topic of expanding her sculptures into the exhibition space in her 2019 solo exhibition Hannah at Kavi Gupta’s Elizabeth Street gallery in Chicago. For that show, she constructed painted and sculptural “shadows” on the floors and walls, extending outward from the works.

“I expanded the rust and dust colors into the space,” Yanko says. “That was when I began thinking about environment in intentional ways.”

Now, Yanko is wondering more about the internal aspects of a body’s presence in space; how can the projection of physical presence be considered when making the work?

“It’s more exploration around making a sculpture,” Yanko says, “starting to perfect certain things in the medium, how I can manipulate it from outside.”