Carrie Yamaoka (b. 1957) is an artist. In addition to her work of silent resistance in photography, painting, and sculpture, she has, since the late 1980s, incorporated an attention to language and layout, and the embedding of words on surfaces, textures, in our minds and in our social structure.

Yamaoka’s early text-based works serves as powerful metaphors for making visible what has been erased in our daily lives, culture, and society. In a conversation with Alex Fialho, Yamaoka: “…I became incredibly frustrated with abstract painting, which is what I felt like I had been doing, and I felt like there was just such an incredible inadequacy to that language, because it was also idiosyncratic, and I became way more interested in received language and inventive language.”

Since the mid-1990s, Yamaoka has questioned the instability of subjectivity within the materiality of painting. Her rule-breaking strategies embrace accidents and discard binarities such as improvisation/intention, methodology/intuition and surface/depth. “I wanted to be able to work in a way that addressed the body more directly, that had a relationship to physicality.” She was interested in reflective mylar after experimenting with mirror glass, a material that was always “a hard, objective representation… [W]hereas mylar is incredibly malleable.” Yamaoka’s haptic relationship with reflective mylar changes in accordance with the way she casts it in flexible resin or mounts it to wood panel; it is also dependent on the kind of adhesives that she uses to mount it, and on various working conditions, such as the humidity of the environment when the resin is poured.

“It’s not that I’m actually molding the ground. I’m kind of setting up conditions and allowing accidents to happen within a controlled domain… I’m interested in the relationship of the way that chance plays into the process. And I’m interested also in a kind of alchemy that happens with materials and with chemicals. I guess I’ve had a long-standing involvement with chemicals because when I did the photo pieces, the book pieces, I was using chemicals to bleach out text and working with erasure.”

The folding and unfolding action Yamaoka performed when making works such as 20 by 16 (black vinyl fold) (2015/2024) left a crease running down the left-hand side of the work. The invisible residue left by the artists fingerprints on the black vinyl had formed a kind of resist. This caused the clear resin the artist poured on top to lift ever so slightly in certain spots over time. This work thus continues to develop in time, re-structuring the artwork set up in the original “photographic” moment almost a decade ago. Yamaoka has recently re-poured a fresh coat of resin on top—a gesture in keeping with her current revisiting of older works. “14.125 by 11.625”, another series that was on view in Yamaoka’s exhibition “lucid / liquid / limpid” at Kiang Malingue in 2024, is an ongoing attempt that re-introduces vibrant colours onto the surfaces. It is also another reference to the photographic moment—which runs like a thread throughout Yamaoka’s work.

Yamaoka’s work wrestles with the viewer’s desire to search for an image: “I want the viewer to lurk in that limbo, that place before an image is arrived at.” She is one of the founders of fierce pussy.

Carrie Yamaoka’s artworks have been shown in major art institutions including ICA, Philadelphia; MOMA/PS1, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Ricard, Paris; the Henry, Seattle; Artists Space, New York; the Wexner, Columbus; Leslie Lohman Museum, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and MassMOCA, North Adams. Writing about her work has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, The New Yorker, Time Out/NY, Hyperallergic, Interview, and Bomb. Her art is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox; the Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Henry Art Gallery; and Centre Pompidou. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and an Anonymous Was A Woman award (2017). She is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy. She lives and works in New York.