Piece description from the artist
Josh M. G. Yates’ Dream Mirror is defined by the union of negative and positive space, where dreams and reality collide. The activated white passage consuming the upper half of the painting establishes a deceptive sense of absence. At first glance, the white expanse seems like an empty void compared to its lower butterfly-filled, light blue, black, and green neighbor. However, the upper half of the painting is only an opaque layer over the dreams or memories lost to the unconscious.
The monochromatic abstraction of the upper portion could be the world of dreams, while the figurative-inflected lower half is reality subtly bleeding into our sleeping excursions. Or, and my favorite, is the painting is entirely about the dream world. The lower portion represents the parts of our dreams we hazily remember, and the upper passage describes the dreams that flee from our memories as we wake.
Born in the English Channel Islands, Josh M. G. Yates moved permanently to the east coast, USA, eventually settling in New York City. He holds a BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts.
In his paintings, esoteric phenomena and landscape imagery are rendered as abstracted layers of color. Also incorporated are drawn elements and other mark making. Repeating symbols are suspended, and intricate images often embedded onto the canvas surface.
Josh, in his words, invites a viewer’s interpretation. He places an emphasis on the power of the collective-unconscious and says that his paintings exist in-part to reveal it.
When embraced through a metaphorical lens, Yates’ paintings, in name and content, often reveal a dramatic conjuration; of the esoteric and the more determinate and dramatically rendered compositions. A weaving of free-form, feverish hand-application and the more intricately rendered scatterings of symbolic motifs across the canvas surface, Josh’s paintings renew with prolonged engagement, particularly together, as though compositionally the paintings are unfixed iterations of one another.
His paintings have been collected in the US and abroad.
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