Catherine Yass
(1963 - ) |
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positive and negative brightly colored photographs Art Work
| Name: |
Catherine Yass |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
London, United Kingdom |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Birth: |
1963 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
positive and negative brightly colored photographs |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Photography
Filmmaker
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Biography
Institutions, their relationship with identity, and how individuals are shaped by them, preoccupy Catherine Yass. She takes photographs of people, but her subjects are always part of wider networks. And sometimes her pictures are just of institutional spaces themselves, empty and eerie (she photographed Bankside power station while it was being stripped down and transformed into Tate Modern). Yass manipulates her films, overlaying positives and negatives to make areas of blurring and dense color, incandescent blues, greens, pinks, yellows and oranges. Her pictures have a hallucinogenic, dreamlike quality, of heated energy or heavy oppression. Mounted on light-boxes, they glow with heightened presence and depth.
Yass trained at the Slade and Goldsmiths. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Tavistock Clinic for Psychotherapy in 1991- Projects followed at Springfield Hospital in 1995, and (with artists Zarina Bhimji and Tania Kovats) for the Public Art Development Trust in 1997. Yass's training and her subsequent work, picturing institutions such as medical organizations, can be interpreted in the light of Michel Foucault's theory of institutions. For Foucault, all institutions (art college, hospital, and asylum) are involved in the same 'exercise of power'. They position the people within them into hierarchies, giving them a place in the order of things, creating within them a sense of themselves and their relation to the people around them. Yass has trained her camera on organizations that are a key part of our lives.
Other organizations to have come under Yass's scrutiny include government, business and the British Arts Council. Her pictured spaces include the Prague metro, and Tokyo's capsule hotels, mini rooms stacked row upon row, so that their occupants look like products on a supermarket shelf. And in 2001 an exhibition of Yass's work. Star, was part of the Tenth Indian Triennial in Mumbai. Images of an empty cinema, its tiered seats hot orange and yellow, were juxtaposed with portraits of 'Bollywood' actors. Their faces are seen clearly, thrown into sharp relief by hazy backgrounds. There is a sense that the stars have surfaced as individuals for a moment, and were caught by Yass's camera, only to be re-submerged in the surreal world of their films.
Source: Alicia Foster, Tate Women Artists |
Samples of Work
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