Yasmina Chavez, The Suchness of Light
Yasmina Chavez, SOL #1, Silver Gelatin Print, 8"x10" 2019. Courtesy the artist.
By D.K. Sole
The latest exhibition of work by Yasmina Chavez reminds me how protean she is, how flexible, how much she surprises you. Last time I saw her do an art-thing I think she was carrying two yucca plants on the ends of a pole like a water bearer while melting ice dripped into them, a performance she kept up for several hours. In one of her memorable shows half a decade ago at Dana Satterwhite’s TastySpace Gallery she made ceramics out of stuffed animals, coating them in clay and burning them out in the kiln. Now she has made a series of twenty images that look like charcoal rubbed and jiggled across sheets of paper, but the works are flat and smooth, there is no black dust, and the text blurb tells you they were made “with light directly touching the surface of photosensitive material.” The action is chemical transformation, not rubbing. The distance of the hand above the surface becomes immediately mysterious. Was there a hand at all? What was it doing? Where was she?
Yasmina Chavez, SOL #20, Silver Gelatin Print, 16"x20"2019. Courtesy the artist.
Blazingly dark in some places, or folding out into skittering lines, the pictures give you the idea of someone establishing a limited amount of control over an intrinsically unstable and independently variable natural force. The text links her technique to jazz, and to Jackson Pollock’s way of sketching his drips in the air. But that leaves you with the mystery of her tools. Where did the light come from? Was it artificial light, or – as the word “Sol” in each title suggests – the sun? You try to imagine some source, some glow, coming closer to the surface, not touching, threatening to touch, then retreating, maybe tilting sideways, leaving these fuzzes and spurts in its wake. The flat shape records a movement in three dimensions and possibly also a movement through time in the form of an extended or shortened exposure. The jittering spews seem to illustrate explosions from a central mass but really they might have been the hand moving sideways with a precise light – or a magnifying glass -- well after the mass had already formed. Unreadability is enduringly present in what she does. How did she make those sculptures look so weirdly and precisely like toys? you might have wondered at the TastySpace show, not realising that the furry models had been obliterated. How does she make these solid things, these creams of clay and black densities of fried surface, seem so fragile, so haunted, so temporary?
Yasmina Chavez
The Suchness of Light
October 17 – December 20, 2019
Summerlin Library, 1771 Inner Circle Dr., Las Vegas NV 89134
Travels to the East Las Vegas Library from February 11- April 21, 2020.
Image of the album that was released by Julian Tanaka's jazz ensemble Double Fist in conjunction with the October opening of The Suchness of Light. The album can be found online for purchase and download or a hard copy can be purchased from Julian Tanaka through email at juliankeitanaka@gmail.com. Chavez designed the album using the images Tanaka selected from the series, on view in the exhibition.
Australian artist D.K. Sole lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works at the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art where she is in charge of Research and Educational Engagement. She has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, Colorado.
Posted by Wendy Kveck December 2, 2019.