Joseph Yaeger at The Perimeter
There’s a creeping sense of unease in “Time Weft,” Joseph Yaeger’s present of twenty-five new work, occupying all 5 ranges of the Perimeter’s transformed mews-house area. We see the best arm of a person in a white lab coat holding out a tablet in his palm; a close-up of a lady staring forward, ice-blue eyes frozen, face splattered with a black viscous substance; one other girl, a Hitchcockian blonde, whose eyes are lined by the hand of a person standing shut behind her—all painstakingly rendered in watercolor on gessoed linen. The surfaces have a scratchy, slippery, luminous high quality, like previous pictures, textured by time. However the place does the foreboding really come from? The compositions are tightly cropped; we get no context to make clear the eventualities. The titles, gnomic intimations like Freedom from need, Decelerate the place it hurts, Blood, add one other layer of thriller.
Yaeger’s work are primarily based on present pictures—from undisclosed sources—that, as he places it, “jar me, appeal to me, dislodge me.” In a poem written by the artist that’s included within the exhibition catalogue, he displays on a inventory picture of a ravine he as soon as encountered in his orthodontist’s workplace: “My biggest need was not aimed … in the direction of a spot / however its illustration.” For all their affective energy, Yaeger’s works are additionally a cerebral evaluation of mediation and reception, of how work can remodel their topics by creating illusory areas of bodily and psychological depth, and the way they’ll likewise be reworked by language, their atmosphere, and the notion of the viewer. Perhaps there’s nothing sinister occurring in spite of everything—or is that simply what they need you to assume?
