Published on the occasion of the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, Carrie Yamaoka: recto/verso brings together Yamaoka’s early text-based explorations and chemically altered photographs centered on erasure and double meanings with her process-oriented works in reflective polyester film and resin. The exhibition and publication trace Yamaoka’s interest in the multiplicity of being and seeing, and follow the recurring themes of visibility, perception, and subjectivity across the artist’s practice over the last thirty years.

Across her work, Yamaoka (U.S. born 1957) revels in materiality and deploys strategies that mirror a conception of the self and identity that is contingent and elastic. Her work from the early 1990s emerged in relation to the time and its crucible of identity politics, the instability of language and representation, and the emergent AIDS epidemic. Her process-oriented works that followed chart an evolution of her practice and embrace the incidence of chance, states of transformation, and the indeterminate. Operating in the expanded field of painting, these works are also aligned with photographic ideas and principles, inviting questions about what and who constitutes a picture.

This publication features an essay by Nina Bozicnik, Henry Associate Curator and organizer of the exhibition, and 48 full-color plates, in addition to six spreads with images of Yamaoka’s notebooks that highlight her artistic process.  

Soft Cover, 106 pp

9.9 x 7 inches (portrait)

Publisher: Henry Art Gallery, 2019

Design: Jayme Yen

ISBN: 9780935558609