Jason Yates is a multidisciplinary artist with an interest in the crosscurrents of vernacular and craft-based design, folk and outsider art, and various forms of Americana. His recent shelf-based sculptures and wall murals meld counterculture graphics, with references to modernist abstraction and assemblage, minimalism, and pop art. Looking through junk shops and thrift stores, Yates examines the aesthetic, cultural, psychological, and ritualistic aspects of abandoned trinkets, tchotchkes, and other kitsch objects from the recent past.  Engaging in obsessive labor-intensive processes, Yates often pulls at the more disquieting effects of nostalgia and American consumer desire.  

 

The same objects used to represent the values, aspirations, and distractions of American culture can often also signal the cultural dissolution of the American Dream, a reality demonstrated by the fact that so many of these same objects commonly become relegated to basements, attics, and storage spaces, the tombs of American over consumption. Yates brings order to the horde and finds aesthetic pleasures in the chaos of daily life. His work often balances the dualities of light and dark, good and evil, and a sense of gloom and doom with equal parts of humor and satire.

 

Yates composes still life scenes using both literal and symbolic signs of joy and youth, but as he ultimately cloaks his arrangements in black, he turns a shadow box collection of keepsakes into a memento mori of the suburban ideal and childhood innocence. Perhaps in response to the sentimental slogan décor reminding you to be blessed, have hope, live, laugh, and love, that appear throughout his assemblages, Yates captures a few of his own mottos in an accompanying series of murals made from children’s alphabet coloring pages. Using wryly poetic titles that read in a mocking tone, these murals seem to make light or poke fun at the viewer, possibly infantilizing their political fears or their ambivalence about becoming an adult, raising children, growing older, or, like the discarded toys carefully displayed within his crowded shelves, becoming irrelevant. 

 

Yates considers his practice “the intersection of folk art and bondage.” Both terms can have multiple meanings and change with context to cultural region, training, and relationship to power. As an artist with both a BFA and MFA, the identification with folk art might signal his widely known participation in underground art and music communities across the United States and beyond. From graffiti to quilts, folk art is generally known to be created and disseminated within a somewhat hermetic community of like-minded individuals. It could also mean for Yates a kinship with a career outside the major gallery system and the more dominant forms of contemporary art. It could imply both an affinity and empathy with the outsider artist who is marginalized to the periphery of the art world due to aberrant political views or social behaviors that don’t align with mainstream culture. Yates thrives more in the areas of subcultures and collectives that create their own forms of communication and economic exchange, an ethos informed by the ecosystems of punk, independent artisans, and flea market vendors. His reference to bondage could be fetish or a comment on his relationship to labor and the imbalance of exchange between the work and the pay of a working artist. Yates is certainly a combination of all the above.  

 

 

Jason Yates, born 1972 in Detroit, Michigan, is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his BFA from the University of Michigan and his MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. With recent shows in Paris, New York, and Washington D.C., Yates continues his 20 plus year journey of distilling the areas of art, music, fashion, and design into a singular art practice that is expressed through his dynamic and influential collaborative projects and a notorious lifestyle known for his distinctive bridging of art and daily life. Yates participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial with a project in collaboration with the independent publishing group Semiotext(e).