softly burning orbits [curatorial statement + book]
softly burning orbits: scripture
Artist Book
Pre-order
[limited 100 copies, signed by artist]
[delivers in december]
note to softly burning orbits
How do burial practices mediate the finality of death and become continuations of life? How do structured rituals facilitate a speculative relationship between past, present, and future? softly burning orbits animates these deeply human wonderings in spacial and conceptual terms.
At once sculptural and painted, structural and deconstructed, composed and decomposing, the milieu Yu constructs carries us into a frightening unknown where experimentation, provocation, and recalibration can occur. Wrought entirely from decomposable materials, the paintings and sculptural works on display become guides that orient us towards deeper thinking about questions of death, burial, sentience, and remembrance.
In various forms of abstraction, trees are a central subject here; Yu explores their potential as generators, facilitators, and repositories of life. The wooden lattice structures that punctuate the gallery space, whether read literally as trees, or symbolically as stakes or grave markings alongside the ceramic pieces, gather together concepts of living and dead, and blur the boundary between the natural and built worlds. In so doing, the work of softly burning orbits begins to trouble the binary systems of sentience/nonsentience, organic/inorganic, and growth/decay.
Imbricating literary, spiritual, and metaphysical frameworks in his practice, Yu operates not only between worlds, but forms of engagement. Accompanying this exhibition is a book of the same name, which narrativizes an embodied experience of the sculptural work and paintings, and explicates the theoretical foundations of the work shown here. Though they traffic in different modes of communication – one informational and expository, the other sensory and experiential – the two components of softly burning orbits amplify and complicate one another to conjure something beyond.
What is at work in the work, then, is a process of unraveling: Like untangling a tightly bound knot, there is an opacity or even unintelligibility to softly burning orbits that gives way to clarity only when its disparate strands of meaning are untangled. In its unfolding, Yu’s work transcends the dichotomous parts it suspends together.
How do burial practices mediate the finality of death and become continuations of life? How do structured rituals facilitate a speculative relationship between past, present, and future? softly burning orbits animates these deeply human wonderings in spacial and conceptual terms.
At once sculptural and painted, structural and deconstructed, composed and decomposing, the milieu Yu constructs carries us into a frightening unknown where experimentation, provocation, and recalibration can occur. Wrought entirely from decomposable materials, the paintings and sculptural works on display become guides that orient us towards deeper thinking about questions of death, burial, sentience, and remembrance.
In various forms of abstraction, trees are a central subject here; Yu explores their potential as generators, facilitators, and repositories of life. The wooden lattice structures that punctuate the gallery space, whether read literally as trees, or symbolically as stakes or grave markings alongside the ceramic pieces, gather together concepts of living and dead, and blur the boundary between the natural and built worlds. In so doing, the work of softly burning orbits begins to trouble the binary systems of sentience/nonsentience, organic/inorganic, and growth/decay.
Imbricating literary, spiritual, and metaphysical frameworks in his practice, Yu operates not only between worlds, but forms of engagement. Accompanying this exhibition is a book of the same name, which narrativizes an embodied experience of the sculptural work and paintings, and explicates the theoretical foundations of the work shown here. Though they traffic in different modes of communication – one informational and expository, the other sensory and experiential – the two components of softly burning orbits amplify and complicate one another to conjure something beyond.
What is at work in the work, then, is a process of unraveling: Like untangling a tightly bound knot, there is an opacity or even unintelligibility to softly burning orbits that gives way to clarity only when its disparate strands of meaning are untangled. In its unfolding, Yu’s work transcends the dichotomous parts it suspends together.
Tristan Whalen