Carrie Yamaoka

A long-overdue publication by a founding member of feminist collective fierce pussy, Yamaoka's first monograph explores the artist's cross-disciplinary creative practice over several decades.

Initially a student of photography and fascinated by the camera's ability to record and its inability to represent, Carrie Yamaoka has expanded her practice to explore themes of record and transformation across painting, sculpture, and installation. Her eye-catching, sometimes technically incomprehensible works examine how materiality, process, and form connect by calling to the viewer's attention the topography of surfaces, the tactility of the barely visible, and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of an art object.

On view, Yamaoka’s artworks can both reflect and become the spaces in which they are displayed. Often revisiting her earlier works after five, ten, or twenty-five years, the artist is known for converting paintings into sculpture, texts into photograms, or the recto of a piece into the verso, ultimately questioning how the visual experience and orientation of an object defines its form for an audience.

Yamaoka is an original member of fierce pussy, a collective of queer women artists founded in 1991. Launched during the AIDS epidemic and political mobilization around LGBTQ+ rights, fierce pussy used readily available materials—old typewriters, found photographs, printing supplies, and other day job equipment, for example—to bring lesbian visibility to the streets. The collective consists of Nancy Brooks Brody (1962-2023), Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka and it continues to produce work in the present. Yamaoka's work is included in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, and Centre Pompidou.