As part of the LUMA exhibition, curated by Jennifer Ellis and presented by AORA, Brooke Benington is pleased to present works from represented artists Yeni Mao and Ross Taylor. LUMA is a collaborative exhibition that brings together art, design, and architecture with participation from seven leading global galleries. Taking place in two historic warehouses near Old Street, the exhibition looks to shed light on the ebb and flow of structural pause and flux, addressing transition and unpacking environmental, physical and emotional associations.
After visiting the exhibition site, Ross Taylor decided to make a new painting that responds to the scale, the history and the time-worn patina of the space. Taylor's paintings will often emerge over several years through a process of painting and overpainting, stripping back and repairing and reworking until the final iteration rises to the surface. Sometimes abstract, sometimes bearing reference to figures or forms, internalised fictions rise and external influence seeps in. In this instance, he has had to stitch together two prepared canvases to achieve the scale he desired; the scar of this surgery bisects the painting adding to its rich surface topography. From the kaleidoscopic storm of paint emerge suggestions of characters or creatures, wide unblinking eyes - a recent reoccurring motif - stare out at us.
Across the exhibition space, Yeni Mao’s sculptural installations engage in issues of fragmentation through a series of assemblages and architectonic arrangements. He evokes and examines a sense of otherness, with the concurrent sensations of restraint, domination and order. His works are coded with references to subcultures, countercultures and outsiders; enforced or self-imposed on account of their social, racial, sexual, or transnational status. Mao sees deviance as the basis for his multivalent practice. Often layering these larger concerns over his personal histories and social positioning, most recently the projects are based on family mythologies. Playing with the condition of suggestion, Mao places importance on the negative space, the absences, through a circumstantial framework. Equating the anatomy of the body and building systems, he suggests the fabrication and dismantlement of our surroundings is also a reconsideration of ourselves.
