Land Border Other: K Yoland (FotoFest 2016 Biennial at Art League Houston)

Art League Houston is excited to present Land || Border || Other, a solo exhibition by British artist K. Yoland in conjunction with FotoFest 2016 Biennial. Exhibition Dates: March 4 – April 9, 2016. Opening Reception: 6 – 9 PM Friday March 4, 2016. ALH Hallway Space I Artist talk at 6:30 PM.

The exhibition features a series of photographs created during the artist’s four-month artist residency at Marfa Contemporary in West Texas.  While on the border between Mexico and the United States, Yoland used video, photography, sculpture, and performance to investigate sites of division and restriction.

Yoland made several field excursions to the borderland, some by herself and others with border patrol guards, oil industry workers, and cattle ranchers.  On these trips, Yoland observed the effects of natural and artificial boundaries upon these different groups. For example, when she was with the ranchers, she noticed how tumbleweeds passed freely over barbed wire fences or the national border.

She also discovered this iconic plant of the American landscape is not indigenous, but rather, originated in Russia.  Such paradoxes became a source of inspiration for this body of work and a means through which to investigate ideas about borders, invasion, migration, and the alien.

Barbed wire and the commonplace red paper used by construction workers in the area appear frequently.  In response to the fact that ninety-five percent of land in Texas is privately owned, Yoland used these markers of division to delineate and conquer the landscape and the figures in it.  She explores the importance of mapping and ownership as an attempt to assert control over the vast landscape and ourselves.

Through performance, sculpture, photography, and videos, Yoland’s work considers how the physical and conceptual demarcation of the land shapes our relationship to hierarchy, control, and freedom.

ABOUT K. YOLAND

Through photography, live-performance, video and installation, K. Yoland explores the nature of identity, power and borders in our society. Yoland started working with photography eight years into her artistic practice and in many ways it is the natural distillation of her live and video works, influenced as much from theater, dance and cinema as it is informed by the history of photography, performance-art and video-art. The framework of these multi-media experiments lie in the intersection of documentary, magical realism, group-participation, rehearsal and site-specific research.

Given Yoland’s performance background, she says “it is natural that I envision photography as a means to capture a frozen moment from a cinematic or live performance. Blurring the line between fiction and reality, the images act as documentation or witness to an intervention, which I stage with performers, using occasional props or costumes.”

Using a wide range of participants, both trained professionals and volunteers, across Europe and the States, previous projects have included directing a haircut between a barber and soldier outside in the desert, choreographing dancers in a video installation in Copenhagen, performing with Olympic fencers on scaffolding in London, making dream interviews with people on the streets of Harlem and taking employment in 21 different ‘day-jobs’ in Paris.

Exhibiting internationally, Yoland has recently shown with The Lisson Gallery (London), Talley Dunn (Dallas), Turner Contemporary (UK), Alan Cristea Gallery (London) and Marfa Contemporary (West Texas). The artist’s 2014 and 2015 solo exhibitions were Foreign Affair at BeefHaus (Dallas), which focused on international conflict zones including Iraq, Palestine/Israel and Serbia; and Land || Border || Other at Oklahoma Contemporary, which investigated the nature of territory, migration and the alien on the USA/Mexico border.

Yoland moved from London to West Texas, to be the inaugural artist-in-residence with Marfa Contemporary in 2012. Prior to Marfa, Yoland was the 18-month artist-in-residence with South London Gallery and Acme in London. Having just completed a one year residency with Central Trak (Dallas, 2015), Yoland is currently teaching socially and politically engaged art at UTD. Yoland’s current research is on the history of segregation, racism and marginalized communities in Dallas and the United States.

TWITTER; https://twitter.com/KdotYoland