Amy Yoes – Hands Off, She’s Mine, 2001

Amy Yoes conjures ebullient abstractions from the decorative details of the material world. Baroque flourishes, gingham ruffles and calligraphic embellishments tangle within the fluid, heterogeneous space of her dynamic canvases, gleefully eroding any presumed hierarchy between high and low culture. Yoes draws her multifarious imagery from art, architecture, furniture, fashion and printed ephemera of diverse historical and cultural origins. Sketched and scanned into the computer for manipulation, the morphed imagery is then recombined into skillfully painted compositions. Our perceptual logic is challenged by the centrifugal fusion of these disparate visual motifs, a product of the creative interplay between imaginative draftsmanship and digital manipulation. The resulting formal and spatial mutation vividly symbolizes our evolving post-technological condition. Far from rendering the hand painted image irrelevant in the new millennium, the computer offers artists a new perspective on a world being dramatically transformed by technology. Yoes exemplifies an emerging generation of painters who combine art historical tradition and technological innovation to create expressive new forms of visual experience.