Amy Yoes | Mobile Animation Unit | 2018

Amy Yoes combines photography, painting, sculpture, and performance in her installations. While she is interested in upending traditional forms of cultural practice, she does so by tweaking high Modernism’s seriousness by injecting in some technicolor fun. She uses the vocabularies of art history and architecture, infusing them a bright flash of color that stands against the austere International Style that dominates our contemporary cities.

Previous projects include a series of large-scale, moveable sculptures that resemble giant Swiss Army knives, and a secret type of Morse code projected onto large forms, animating them as if they are communicating to us. In her Kitchen Project, every kitchen cupboard door has its own sound track of scrapes and pings, suggesting a secret life for each. The artist helps us see that the supposedly “neutral” objects of our world shape us as much as we shape them.

The work Mobile Animation Unit, 2019-20, comes from the Hélio Lab workshops she set up at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, organized to coincide with the Art Institute’s Hélio Oiticica exhibition in 2017. Oiticica was a Brazilian artist whose mid-20th century cross-genre work freed artists to create works that were of, and for, the people of his time. 

In response to the Oiticica show, Yoes created a workshop of colorful shapes and forms that were manipulated by teams of students and volunteers who helped the artist choreograph the abstract shapes as they made micro-movements in a dance of time. The stop-animation elements were made of cardboard, plexiglass, acetate, paper, and wood. These were supplemented by Yoes’ larger sculptures that supplied an additional range of machine-like motions.

The work is at once funny and a little menacing. While watching the small, brightly colored elements twirl and turn without any outcome or output, it makes the viewer wonder if their own daily machinations have as little return for the energy invested. Occasionally elements will clank and clash against one another, which in the real world this would cause a bottleneck on an assembly line or stress at a staff meeting. Here, all is dissipated in a loss of energy.

This visual vocabulary recalls the work of the Russian constructivists from the first half of the 20th century. Their commitment to non-expressive abstraction was intended to create a universal language for everyone. But the menace of man dominated by machine, so celebrated as freeing humans by the constructivists, is found in work such as Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent science fiction film Metropolis. Lang showed workers fed to machines to keep them going. While Yoes does not explicitly convey whether she thinks machines are good for us or bad, she charges us with sorting that out for ourselves.