JADE YUMANG | OPEN HOUSE SPATTER

From January 15 to March 5, 2022.

The private sphere warrants scrutinizing. In his mélange of sewing, interior decoration, printmaking, and a panoply of the so-called domestic arts, Jade Yumang develops a vantage from which the effects of capitalism’s particular forms of privatization undergo a queer/ed analysis. The premise of privacy has long served to shield all sorts of oppression that too often proceed without intervention or even recognition: domestic abuse, the repression of nonnormative sexual practices, and an exclusionary economics by which upper tier wealth is consolidated are but a few examples of harm hiding out in the interior corners of the private. For that matter, we might recall that the earliest written laws that dictated the ownership of private property applied to women and children as slaves in Rome. Yumang’s assemblages go some distance to insist on remembering the embodied stakes that are navigated behind closed curtains, closed blinds, closed doors, closed closet doors. Citing the exercises in control and being controlled that characterize the homemaker, Yumang aggregates tropes of domestic space into disoriented fragments. Ruffled curtains and other affected window treatments, woven rugs and blankets, and quoted wallpaper and flooring designs have been assembled into psychologically fraught scenery. In particular, Yumang positions the “gay spatter” patterning of popular mid-century vinyl floor tiles as a kind of presentiment for a range of unspeakable violence, physical, psychic, symbolic, seeping out of the contours of heteronormativity and its pressures to assimilate. [...]

- Text excerpt by Matt Morris