FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Will Yackulic: “Precision & Precarity”
March 16–April 30, 2011
Opening Reception: March 19 (5-7PM)
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:30-5:30 PM
Email: info@gregorylindgallery
Gregory Lind Gallery is pleased to present "Precision & Precarity", new work by Will Yackulic. Marking a return to oil painting, these pieces explore the friction between non-objective art and traditional subject matter. Working with woodshop cast-offs, Yackulic built temporary sculptures which served as still lifes for a series of paintings whose formal concerns are underlied by a mysterious metaphorical resonance.
The differing modes and methods with which these paintings have been executed (which range from a cool photographic clarity, to a kind of muted pop, to patinated trouvaille) influence how they are read, and as such, make them difficult to locate historically. Where the sense of patina might seem to lodge some of the works in a modernist pedigree (as if they were somehow damaged and found), the sleek urbanity of others shifts them into a different era. As such, they can be likened to an optometric examination, in which lenses are variously stacked in front of the eye, sometimes subtly and at other times dramatically altering the object of one's vision.
These still lifes, which refuse to be still lifes, are hardly a tour of painting's past, however. Rather, they are romps in a labyrinth of paradox which tradition affords. The precision with which these pictures are made is sharply contradicted by the multitude of readings and historical moments they contain; the so-called precarity they depict could hardly be more stable, now that it has been set in paint.
Will Yackulic’s recent exhibitions include Whatcomb Museum, Bellingham, WA; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; Zero Budget Biennial, traveling exhibition, Paris, Milan, London and Berlin; Gallery Joe, Philadelphia; Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Modern Painters, Flash Art, Art on Paper, Le Monde, Time Out London, Village Voice, The Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Los Angeles Times. Yackulic received his BFA in Painting at the State University of New York at Purchase. He lives and works in New York. This is the artist’s third solo show with Gregory Lind Gallery.