NYAB Event - Will Yackulic "And Now You’re Here"

Will Yackulic "And Now You’re Here"

Jeff Bailey Gallery

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Jeff Bailey Gallery presents Will Yackulic: And Now You’re Here, an exhibition of new paintings.

Yackulic’s new works are from a series titled "Assisted Stain Paintings". Working outdoors, he pours ink, paint and dye on and through canvas. The canvas captures part of the pigment, staining it and creating random patterns. Yackulic manipulates the still-wet pigment and fabric through twisting and folding, and a kind of topographical indexing occurs.

Further "assistance" occurs in the cropping and stretching process. The resulting compositions obscure the paintings' facture; the stains coalesce into semi-recognizable forms evocative of geological formations, bodies of water or landscapes.

For Yackulic, this slippage between the abstract process and the mind's natural tendency to search for the pictorial brings to mind how James McNeill Whistler made his “Nocturne” paintings. But whereas Whistler depicted landscape and infamously pushed his process towards abstraction, Yackulic begins with unidentifiable stains and edits them toward the realm of the representational.

The title of the exhibition implies an arrival, and the titles of the paintings serve as guide: “Mojave”, “Fjord”, “Giverny,” e.g. There is a sense of discovery found in the paintings’ images, as Yackulic’s process gives way to perception.

This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA; The Brucennial, New York; Zero Budget Biennial (traveling exhibition: Paris, Milan, London and Berlin) and at Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco. His work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Art Museum and the Progressive Art Collection. Exhibition reviews have appeared in Artforum, Flash Art, Modern Painters, Art on Paper, The Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle and other publications. Yackulic lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.