Ray Yoshida
By Fred Camper
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One of the most compelling of Yoshida’s early paintings here, the 1974 Questionable Structures, gains some of its power from the title’s comment on the imagery. None of the forms arranged in five lines is recognizable, though they suggest buildings, roadways, hills, part of a figure, perhaps a penis. Each is bordered by heavy black lines, but not on all sides; one feels the absence of line as a tear, as if these forms were damaged or incomplete. Even more than the collages, these forms sit at the edge of suggestiveness–but they’re “questionable” because they lack the completion and definition of real “structures.” Quiet, blank, almost mute, they play several roles–at one extreme they’re the doodles of an artist who doesn’t quite believe in himself, and at the other they’re body parts just hacked off in some horror-movie mayhem.
A more intensely colored series painted between 1980 and 1985 provided me with an answer to these riddles–or so I thought. Its human figures have faces this time, though they reveal little expression, and their gender and size suggest nuclear families. These pictures too lack compositional focus: the figures just stand there, forming no intelligible relationship to one another or to the space. An allover pattern of small colored dots and marks continues through their bodies–a kind of demented pointillism that supplies a busy surface and undercuts the figures’ authority. As in much of the earlier work, the space is tight, constricted, even claustrophobic. The figure I took as the mother in Miraculous Matriarch (1980) has long arms that fold back on themselves several times, extending upward and sideways to suggest a scary, snakelike overreaching. Even though she and the dad appear to be clothed, their pubic hair and the father’s penis are clearly visible. The three kids, one of whom is a bit taller than Dad, are shown in profile, revealing the two boys’ bulging crotches. In two places, the figures seem to bump against each other, though neither seems cognizant of that fact.
But none of this background information accounts for the dark self-abnegation of Yoshida’s work, the theme of identity concealed or lost–the way he chooses “mystery and deferral, obfuscation and delay,” as James Yood writes in his excellent catalog essay. The subtle drama of Yoshida’s work lies in the way his forms barely assert themselves, then seem ready to disappear into his allover patterns. The aptly titled Mute (1991) has a window shape at its center crossed by horizontal bars, hinting at a jail. But it can’t really be read as a window because of the black and white splotches within it, suggesting neither depth nor flatness, transparency nor opaque surface. The fragmentary shapes around it are even less representational; the final effect is of brooding silence.
Starbuck’s home never burned, she told me, but her father was so obsessed with “fire readiness” that “he had special ladders for all of us in our rooms, to get us out.” Born in 1957, she grew up in eastern Long Island; she now lives in Georgia, where she moved after getting her MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 1992. She recalls her upper-middle-class childhood as “perfect and horrible at the same time,” describing her mother as aggressive and erratic, changing from day to day. She found reading Freud helpful because he argues that “you can have a response to something that may be located in a tiny moment.” But her work isn’t strictly autobiographical; working as a baby-sitter in other middle-class homes, she noticed homemakers’ obsessions with cleanliness and their unrealistic fears of break-ins.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): “False Front” by Ray Yoshida; “Dirt Yard” by Robin Starbuck.
