Yellow/ing at Dimin, New York, NY
The sun’s bright circle high on the page in a child’s drawing of home: her house and her family, standing by an azalea bush in the front yard. A green leaf turned to gold, falling toward its shadow. The happiest day you can remember, its vision of amber light stopped in time. Inside the house, papers and photographs hung up on display for years, their surfaces becoming brittle and discolored in slow decay.
The work in “Yellow/ing” centers a single color to move across themes of life and death, sorrow and joy, memory and becoming. How could yellow and its associated shades come to represent such complex and conflicting parts of our lives and selves? Yellow shifts between the light and shadows of our emotions. It is the hue most associated with happiness, embodying the warmth of sunlight, of laughter filling a room. Yet, within its vibrancy lies a deeper shade. Sorrow, sickness, and nostalgia are all bound up in this color as well. This dual symbolism of yellow—its ability to evoke both the heights of joy and the depths of pain — mirrors the human condition itself. Within every moment of happiness lies the potential for that happiness’ end.
Rooted in a perpetual state of in-betweenness — between cultures, languages, and artistic mediums— this exhibition mirrors the broader exploration of existence’s dualities. Amid the blocks of nature and architecture, we join the sculptural pieces in their own dreamscape. We freeze with the sculptures in their moments of motion and emotion. Where we see the figures’ ochre spirals turning into each other, we know the knot of feelings, vulnerabilities, and relations they carry as our own, navigating our lives and worlds within and beyond ourselves. In their states of in-betweenness and transformation, this work stops time, glowing the low yellow of memory. -Written by Daniel Barnum