Carrie Yamaoka

Exploring how materiality, process, and form connect, Yamaoka investigates the topography of surfaces, the tactility of the barely visible, and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of an art object.Initially a student of photography, Yamaoka works across painting, sculpture, and installation. She has long been interested in both photography’s ability to record and its inability to represent, and her works engage the notion of capturing or documenting phenomena across media. Often revisiting her earlier works after five, ten, or twenty-five years, the artist is known for transforming paintings into sculpture, texts into photograms, the recto of a piece into the verso, ultimately questioning how the visual experience and orientation of an object defines its form for an audience. On view, Yamaoka’s artworks can both reflect and become the spaces in which they are displayed. Themes of record and transformation thread throughout her practice over several decades, joined together and examined in this long-overdue publication.Yamaoka is also a member of fierce pussy, a collective of queer women artists founded in 1991. Launched amidst the AIDS epidemic and political mobilization around LGBTQ+ rights, fierce pussy used readily available materials such as old typewriters, found photographs, printing supplies, and other day job equipment to bring lesbian identity and visibility to the streets. The collective consists of Nancy Brooks Brody (1962-2023), Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka and it continues to produce work in the present.