YveYANG is pleased to present Bodies, reciprocal motions, a group exhibition featuring five 2023 graduates of Yale School of Art’s Master of Fine Arts program in Sculpture: Camilla Carper, Anat Keinan, Younes Koudier, SR Lejeune, and Stephen Lordan. The exhibition runs from June 3rd through July 1st, with a public reception on Saturday, June 3rd from 6 to 8 pm.
Bodies, reciprocal motions examines how the selected sculptures choreograph the visitor’s experiences to navigate the actions, reactions, and counterreactions sparked between the gallery’s spatial body, the visitor’s perceiving body, and the artist’s individual creating body. This reciprocal system of motions welcomes the viewer to literalize the sculpture’s potential energy in their movements and traverse the work’s conceptual landscape in contemplation. Reversely, the viewer’s perceptual journey remodels the artworks as not merely the embodiment of the artist’s creating selves, but also enables new interpretations. As such, Bodies, reciprocal motions incubates a system in which the artworks enter a dialectic relationship with the viewers, albeit occupying different spatio-temporal positions and sensorial planes.
Camilla Carper’s Reset Control (2023) offers testimony to Carper’s laborious process of production/performance that escapes and redefines the boundaries of the gallery body. The work’s suspended presence juxtaposes with its referent, Carper’s six-month “dressing project,” during which the artist wore the same pair of silk pajamas every night, while gradually recording the colors of the garments they wore during the day onto pajamas with screen print ink. SR Lejeune disperses pieces of manually machined brass “corners,” rounding (2023), throughout the gallery space not only to acknowledge existing corners in an act of discovery, but also to invite viewers to create and re-construct corners, broadly defined. Unlike rounding’s unyielding presence denoted by opaque metal, Lejeune’s skylight (2023) offers the viewers a wavering image of the artist’s painted sky reflected from the work’s 25-degree-tilted mirror-polished stainless steel placed on the ground level.
As the visitors navigate their bodies around the sloped structure of Anat Keinan’s Practice (2023), they synchronize their movements with the piece’s diagonal dynamism and a hidden machine body, propelled by running gears and motors. These movements are then counterbalanced by a leveling tool embedded in an unmoved gallery wall. Younes Koudier’s scent-infused handcrafted doll Panther Angel (2021), along with his video installation Pantheress Heart (2023), reveals the possibility of a perceiving body not only as a visual and moving being, but also in the acts of smelling, touching, listening, imagining, and sympathizing. Weaving himself through layers of bodies, Koudier harmonizes olfactory, poetic, ritualistic, and mythological experiences in his celebration of color, sensuality, and motherland.
By bringing forward the potential energy in yet-to-hatched eggs, Stephen Lordan’s Egg Bath (2022) ironically embodies a rejuvenating healing power at the cost of fracturing pains and the (un)birth of the unknown. The cooked eggs are bathed in pseudo-bodily-fluid, which contains Himalayan salt and calamine lotion, a medication made from powdered minerals to treat skin irritation.
Camilla Carper, Anat Keinan, Younes Kouider, SR Lejeune, Stephen Lordan
Camilla Carper (b.1990, Sacramento, CA) is an artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY. They received a BFA in Fashion Design from Parsons School of Design in 2012. They worked for a decade in the fashion industry with companies like BLESS and Eckhaus Latta, while running their own clothing brand/collaborative art practice FEMAIL. FEMAIL was featured in Vogue, Interview magazine, and broadcast on NPR with City Arts and Lectures. FEMAIL showed work internationally in various galleries in museums such as the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, in D.C.(2019) The Community, in Paris (2019), and Seattle Art Museum, in Washington (2018). Carper has always remained dedicated to their own performance practice while juggling collaborative work and a career in the Fashion Industry. They just received an MFA from Yale School of Art in Sculpture in May 2023, where Carper explored how the byproducts of their labor function in an art context. This summer Carper has a solo exhibition, currently on view, at LRCHQ in New York, and is directing a documentary about their uncle, Jeff Rehg, funded by Yale Universities Fund for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Studies FLAGS Award (2023).
Anat Keinan (b. 1989, Jerusalem, Israel) is an artist currently based in New Haven, CT. She graduated with an honor BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (2017), studied Fine Art at the HGB Art Academy in Leipzig, Germany (2016), and completed an MFA in Sculpture at Yale School of Art (2023). Her work has been exhibited at various galleries, museums, and art spaces, including The Israel Museum, The Jerusalem Artist House, The 7th Biennale for Drawing in Israel, Atelier Shemi Gallery, The Jerusalem Print Workshop, "Fresh-Paint" Art Fair in Tel Aviv, The New Gallery Teddy, and more. Anat Keinan received the Susan H. Whedon Honorary Award from Yale School of Art in recognition of an outstanding graduating student in Sculpture (2023), and the Dean's Travel Fellowships from Yale School of Art (2022). She is the recipient of the Young Artist Award from the Jerusalem Print Workshop (2018), The Herman Struck Prize for Artistic Printmaking (in 2015 and 2018), and received the Departmental Award for Excellence from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (2017).
Younes Kouider (b. 1991, Algiers) is an interdisciplinary Algerian artist whose work touches on the psyche of North African society and the birth of myths. Younes studied Fine Arts at Maharishi International University, graduated with a BFA in 2014, then an MA in 2018. In the fall of 2021, he joined Yale School of Art where he completed an MFA in Sculpture. Younes participate in a solo show organized in Dar Abdellatif by the Agence Algérienne pour le Rayonnement Culturelle in January 2021. He recently was invited as an artist at the first edition of Renc'Art festival in Algeria in June 2022. He currently works in performance and video both on a project between USA and Algeria called "On becoming a mother goddess" where he displays imaginary visuals from first childhood impressions.
SR Lejeune (b. 1994, Boston, MA) is an artist currently based in Pine Plains, NY and Brooklyn, NY. They received a BA with High Honors in Studio Art from Oberlin College in 2015, were a Core Fellow at the Penland School of Craft from 2017-19, and completed an MFA in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art in May 2023. Recent exhibitions include A Consolation of Things at The Sculpture Center in Cleveland, OH (2020-21) and horizon line in YR ABCSs at Green Hall Gallery at the Yale School of Art (2023). SR will be a West Bay View Foundation Fellow at Dieu Donné in Brooklyn, NY in fall 2023.
Stephen Lordan (b. Cork, Ireland) is an artist currently based in New Haven. He works with sculpture, sound, writing, and other myriad modes, as necessary. He received a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths in London, and completed his MFA in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art in May 2023. Recent exhibitions include Yale University, USA; Tate Britain, UK; and Timothy’s, IRE. He was the recipient of a Visual Artist Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2020.
Opening Reception: 06.03.2023, 6-8pm
