26555 Evergreen Road – Southfield, Michigan
January 24, 2020 – December 31, 2020
Time Equities, Inc. Art-in-Buildings is pleased to announce the next exhibition in the AiB Gallery at Travelers Towers, Our Valence by Kennedy Yanko in collaboration with Lutfi Janania and a performance by Zachary Tye Richardson.
Please join us for an opening celebration at the AiB Gallery Friday, January 24, 2020, 6:00-8:00 pm. Performance by Zachary Tye Richardson at 8:30 pm.
Brooklyn-based artist Kennedy Yanko is known for her large sculptural works that place rigid foundations of crushed metal in conversation with fluid, sumptuous paint skins. Her work creates what may be perceived as contradictions between hard and soft materials, but for Yanko emphasizes the synergies in the objects’ organic, elemental compositions. As she explains, “my understanding of the world – all matter – is created from frequencies – the buzzing of atoms. What happens within an atom is the building block of existence.”
In the AiB Gallery at Travelers Towers, Yanko furthers her exploration of the organic interconnectedness of all materials, collaborating with Lutfi Janania, a botanical artist working with exotic flora, and performance artist Zachary Tye Richardson. Through this performance-based sculptural installation Yanko illustrates the intangible regenerative moment between life’s beginning and end, offering a “glimpse of what must occur.”
At the center of Our Valence is a lush crown-like shrine of dried flowers and ferns. A sharp chartreuse painted backdrop extends behind the sculpture and wraps across the wall and floor, unifying the installation by pulling the viewer’s eye to a second wall-mounted shrine across the room – a dry, prickly frame that lies in stark contrast to its lush counterpart. Richardson animates the space through performance, a recording of which is projected onto the walls of the gallery. Their movements vibrate with the energy of the surroundings, activating the metal base, the paint skin, and botanicals, embodying what cannot be seen by the naked eye: “the breath of life.” Towards the front of the installation sits a shallow, clear pool of water, which acts as a collision between the dry and the lush shrines, and offers a visual moment of pause.
With Our Valence, Yanko and Janania create the backdrop through which Richardson articulates the continuous co-existence of materials and their unseen lives. As sculptural objects, the shrines sit within the gallery’s walls – as performative objects, with Richardson’s choreography they tell a deeper story.
Artist Statement:
“Our Valence is a performance-driven installation comprised of exotic florals, organic material, found metal and paint skins, and narrative bodily movement. It is a somaesthetic enactment of creating the indivisible: building the building blocks of matter. This room represents the personifying moment when seemingly opposite forces harmonize. Our Valence exists as the repetitive moment that begins and ends again and again. It must occur before life can be seen, felt, heard, or perceived as a whole.
Here, corporal sensation and its accompanying ricochet of human phenomena remind viewers of their potential for an ever-expanding spectrum of experience. This space, designated for self-experimentation, is where intellectualization rests, gazes at, and learns from its proprioceptive counterpart: intuition.”
