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Main | Artists | Images | Curatorial Statement
YellowCurated by Lia Trinka-Browner
May 29 - June 28, 2008
YELLOW
If you were to ask: “What else would be included in this show?” I would answer, “Well as long as it wasn’t too trite, Richard Tuttle’s Yellow Curves 1965, Lawrence Weiner’s ONE QUART GREEN EXTERIOR INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL (1968) and maybe something by Edna St. Vincent Millay in the reader.”
If you were to ask why Yellow, I would say because most paper yellows when it gets old. Because yellow is the color of a taxi-cab. And Donovan wrote that song, “Mellow Yellow”.
The Show:
Yellow is a show about material and language, primarily paper and text. Although… I really wanted to depart from a primarily text-based show and investigate the paper side of it, the material aspect of the work; as collage, construction and dissection.
Yellow is a term that’s been used frequently in writing: yellow journalism’s sensationalist fibs, The Yellow Book’s decadent writings and illustrations (published in the 1890’s in London), and of course, the ultimate contact reference book, the yellow pages. In this way it seems appropriate to riff on the history of a color, picked out especially from the large weird rainbow, and why that particular color’s meaning is widely varied. It’s associated with jaundice even though yellow roses designate friendship. It can be racial slang and the color of caution or penalty in sports and drag racing. But yellow is also a base color or a base concept. I began to think about the naming of colors and the systems of language that we use on a daily basis, especially in writing or description. Both the cutting up of visual information, and the arrangement (or rearrangement) of language is important in the woks of the artists involved. In order to make sense of a system they have to dissect it and move it around, that way the system can become their own and they can use it to a particular end.
The Reader:
Starting with The Yellow Book, I began to think about what it means to compile a book, magazine or “educational” reader and what various content might do to define that particular compilation. I ultimately decided that what’s most interesting about magazines is that you can flip through them and pick and chose what you want to look at or read. There are a lot of choices. It’s non-committal yet enjoyable. In the same way that The Yellow Book chose avant-garde, sometimes risky, illustrations (that didn’t necessarily correspond to the writing on the opposite page), I wanted to highlight a group of younger Los Angeles based writers and illustrators who are all working in interesting, different and playful (sometimes comical) ways. I like the tension between the various styles of drawings and the way the contributors responded to a semi open-ended platform. In the end, this is a reader about making a reader, about deciding to publish drawings and writings and “whatever falls in between”, thus making the standardized educational reader something more like a catalogue of works that I like. It’s definitely not a tight book with a singular concept, but instead, an object that can be thumbed through, perused and enjoyed.
-Lia Trinka-Browner