Aaron Yassin: Reconstructed Realities
A Taste of Art at The Arcade
139 West 35th Street (between 7th & B'way)
October 5 - December 3, 2006
By SUZANNE DE VEGH
Aaron Yassin Infinity Diagram - Rose Planetarium, NYC, NY 2002
Pigment print, 34 x 34 inches
Courtesy the Artist
Aaron Yassin is an architect of sorts—one who employs digital images to construct intriguing representations of 'virtual' spaces—an architecture of images. Many of Yassin's subjects are awe-inspiring classics (i.e.: the Eiffel Tower, the Basilica of San Marco, the Hancock Tower in Boston) photographed from unexpected vantage points.
Yassin typically starts with one striking, precisely cut fragmentary image, stripped of its original identifying contextual details, a clean piece of visual information prepared for its integration into an entirely new system, much in the way a gene is made ready for splicing. He then replicates this isolated element multiple times and astutely manipulates it to produce a kind of organic module, a building block which provides the structure for consistently inventive and complex compositions.
A digital era Piranesi, Yassin's sense of aesthetics speaks to the inestimable volume and unsentimental nature of the information age. In some ways his digital hybrids reflect the ubiquity of software that allows a Photoshop type of Cubism only technically possible now.
Thanks to the World Wide Web an unprecedented proliferation of images are ready and available at all times to download, cut, paste and manipulate at will by professionals and non-professionals alike. In the face of this plethora, Yassin sticks to the notion of utilizing unique images powerful enough to build self contained worlds unto themselves. His strategy is formally and conceptually a value-added process unlike Warhol's use of a single image reproduced serially to effectively reduce it to near impotence.
In the hands of a less thoughtful and adept artist this formal approach might generate at best provocative graphic design, but in this case the rich spatial environments Yassin creates in Reconstructed Realities have a living quality, in the sense that the "modules" and the “fields” they exist in seem capable of growth and change.
Yassin creates dynamic visual systems containing optically oscillating forms, shifting planes and expanding vistas which allude to real, imagined and virtual places and experiences. The diversity is dazzling and evokes a myriad of systemic/ organizational models, spatial constructs, patterns of growth and visual stimuli including: science fiction worlds, kaleidoscopes, fractals, rotating dials on a slot machines, the time and space relationships in David Hockney's "joiners," and the wit of Lucas Samaras' "Photo-Transformations," to name a few.
Another quality which elevates these digitally transformed images to a category of conceptual seriousness is Yassin's grasp of the social/ historical implications of his subjects and the way in which it conditions his response. For example, The Phoenix from the "The Venetian Project" series (alternatively titled "Teatro la Fenice") alludes to the grand, famous theater destroyed by fire and rebuilt three times, and is a concrete manifestation of a culture's idea of civilization. Yassin's interior shot, from which the whole is generated, resembles a golden honeycomb section buzzing with the spirit of human creativity. Yassin captures the glamour and celebratory character of this palace of high culture and perhaps even alludes to its fiery history via the composition's dominant motif: clustered fragments of chandeliers. Like radiant flowers, these light fixtures brightly illuminate the darkened theater. The glowing bulbs are exponentially multiplied here and metaphorically suggest the revelatory quality and power of great art to inform and deepen one's understanding of the world.
Just as The Phoenix references a real place and conveys in part a feeling of lived experience, Yassin's Rose Planetarium in his "Infinity Diagram" series references what we strive to know but cannot directly experience. Rose Planetarium initiates a metaphysical questioning more commonly thought of as the purview of science philosophy and spirituality, a territory that Yassin also claims for art.
Fragmented like ladders leading to another dimension, networks of the building's tubular framework change in scale and recede, effectively conveying a sensation of limitlessness. Skillfully hidden cuts disguise the contact points of multilayered images which makes the structurally complex composition purposefully difficult to apprehend and evocative of the near incomprehensibility of the vast nature of the cosmos.
Cannily selecting architectural icons, Yassin trades on the cachet associated with canonical examples of formal beauty, rigor and excellence and by association legitimizes his own practice. He succeeds because he offers a fresh and relevant new vision.
Much more than technically sophisticated homages to the edifices themselves, Yassin masterfully creates independent and original statements about these places. His work is a deeply engaging commentary on the nature of human experience and communication sensitive to the particulars of this moment and beyond.
Suzanne de Vegh is a Program Officer in Education & Lecture Programs, Arts & Culture at Japan Society, New York. She has published in The Brooklyn Rail, American Ceramics, and Sculpture.
