Kennedy YankoSet It Off

Curated by Racquel Chevremont & Mickalene Thomas—collectively known as Deux Femmes Noires

Combining sculpture, installation, and painting, Kennedy Yanko explores the limitations of vision by engaging the seen and unseen (or overlooked) factors that affect, contribute to, and moderate human experience. Utilizing material sourced from salvage yards along with dried paint skins, metal, marble, and glass, the artist creates monumentally scaled sculptures that address how human perception and societal expectations are often in conflict with each other. Yanko explains, “I utilize reframing to challenge what we think we understand and ask viewers to investigate realities outside of their learned ways of seeing. I select materials that vibrate with both harmony and discord to convey the interior friction that arises when one is tasked with altering a preconceived notion.” For Set It Off, Yanko presents three free-standing sculptures, including one work in the Parrish Meadow, Landscape 1 (2022), and two in the galleries: Wading the Storm, 2022, and In the Whole World Together (2022), a large, mangled piece of corten steel which is perfectly balanced on a single point. The sculpture, resembling an abstracted figure, is draped with a large blue paint skin. By joining the found object with the paint skin, Yanko creates a formal and conceptual reciprocity that makes the two surfaces nearly indivisible, and at times, indistinguishable. Read more on the Parrish Museum website.

Images courtesy of the Parrish Museum.

Photography: BFA