RE: Carrie Yamaoka

Emerging from a formative background in photography and fascinated by the camera's ability to record and inability to represent, Carrie Yamaoka explores processes of recording and transformation across painting, sculpture, and installation. The artist’s first monograph is a thoughtful examination of her cross-disciplinary practice over several decades.

Yamaoka’s visually arresting, ground-breaking works reveal how materiality, temporality, and form connect, calling the viewer's attention to the topography of surfaces, the tactility of the barely visible, and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of an art object. This volume also strongly features her latest focus: a return to earlier works, taking them apart to create newly transformed, re-configured pieces. In Yamaoka’s words, “The liminal, the scarred, and the ephemeral are all laid bare.”

re: Carrie Yamaoka is designed and printed with a formal nod to the visual phenomena at play when encountering the artist’s work in person—the ways in which reflection, refraction, distortion, and the surrounding environment (including the viewer) become part of the compositional field. This in-depth study of the artist’s oeuvre is accompanied by texts from artists and scholars Jill H. Casid, Claire Grace, Josiah McElheny, and Jo-ey Tang, with a correspondence between Yamaoka and the art historian and critic Elisabeth Lebovici.

Yamaoka's work is included in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, and Centre Pompidou. She is also a founding member of fierce pussy, the queer art collective, alongside artists Nancy Brooks Brody (1962-2023), Joy Episalla and Zoe Leonard. The group continues to collaborate today.