Carrie Yamaoka is an interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges across painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture. She engages with the topography of surfaces, materiality and process, the tactility of the barely visible and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object. Her work addresses the viewer at the intersection between records of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture emerging in fleeting and unstable states of transformation. Her material engagement and rule-breaking strategies embrace accidents and dissolve binaries, such as improvisation/intention, methodology/intuition, and surface/depth. Toggling between visibility and invisibility, overlaying legibility and illegibility, breaking apart and recomposing, Yamaoka’s work is in a constant state of mutation.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Yamaoka engaged directly with erasures, in text-based paintings, darkroom photographic processes, and mirror surfaces. Through recuperation of typewriter correction ribbons that registered erased words, through redaction and removal via chemical stripping, these gestures served as powerful metaphors, making visible what has been erased in our daily lives, culture, and society. Since the mid-1990s, Yamaoka has sought a direct relationship with the nature of perception, towards an open field of subjectivity as it relates to physical, social, and political bodies and their instability. She deploys a restrained formal vocabulary of mirror, reflective mylar film, resin, and their potential alchemical formations, in which poured and marred surfaces absorb, reflect, and distort their surroundings.

In recent years, Yamaoka’s methodology and experimentation with the materiality of time extends to revisiting dormant finished or unfinished works from her studio, by taking apart substrates and reconfiguring their constituent parts, breaking apart, peeling, and interlacing new and aged elements and processes, sometimes decades apart. The resulting works, titled as redux or revisited, bear traces of the older works, so that the past is brought into and intertwines with the present.

Carrie Yamaoka’s work has been exhibited at major art institutions, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; MoMA PS1, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris;  Fondation Ricard, Paris; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle;  Artists Space, New York; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Participant Inc., New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Grey Art Museum, New York;  MassMOCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; and Zilkha Gallery/Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. Writing on her work has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, The New Yorker, Time Out/NY, Hyperallergic, Interview, Ursula, and BOMB. Her work is included in the public collections of the Buffalo AKG, the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, Dallas Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, Sunpride Foundation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and an Anonymous Was A Woman award (2017). Yamaoka is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy. She lives and works in New York City.