Carrie Yamaoka at Spritz3000

Carrie Yamaoka
(b. 1957) based in New York, New York

Reflective polyester film, urethane resin and mixed media on wood panel
10 × 8 × 7/8 in.

10 by 8 (flake.verso) (2024) by Carrie Yamaoka exemplifies her ongoing exploration of material instability and surface as a mutable register of time. The title indexes both the work’s modest scale and its reversed orientation, where the “verso” or back side of reflective polyester film is exposed. In fact, revealing the verso behind the recto, or making visible the barely seen are long characteristics of the artist’s practice. Here, Yamaoka’s process, peeling and “flaking” mark the surface with chance abrasions, producing a fractured topography that unsettles perception. Light, scratches, and chemical reactions create shifting constellations that alternately reveal and obscure. Suggesting both erosion and resilience, the work negotiates between presence and disappearance, control and chance, surface and depth.

Reflective polyester film, acrylic, urethane resin and mixed media on wood panel
10 × 8 × 7/8 in.

10 by 8 (wall #5) (2024) continues Carrie Yamaoka’s investigation of surface as both image and index. The 10 x 8 inch format recalls the scale of photographic paper, while “wall” points to both the physical support and the idea of surface as a boundary—something looked at, leaned against, or marked over time. Reflective polyester film and resin hold a constellation of speckled marks produced through chemical chance and controlled intervention. Oscillating between opacity and reflection, the piece mirrors the viewer even as it resists legibility, evoking weathered plaster, photographic grain, or celestial skies.

Digital print on synthetic chiffon
54 × 36 in.
Edition 1 of 7 + 2 AP

In Stump, a large-scale digital print on synthetic chiffon depicts the cut base of a tree, its rings and weathered surface captured in high detail. The lightweight, translucent fabric hangs loosely, allowing the image to shift and ripple with movement or air. Yamaoka transforms a static photographic subject into a mutable object, extending her ongoing exploration of surface instability, perception, and the quiet poetics of absence, trace, and environmental change.

panel 8
Archival pigment print
20 × 16 in.
Edition 2 of 3

Carrie Yamaoka’s Archipelagoes (2019) is a 23-panel cycle that reconsiders an earlier analogue series of 18 photograms made between 1991–94 as an incomplete abecedarium of sequestered American sites—“prisons, hospitals, concentration camps—functioning as both word and image.” The new works, printed digitally from the original set and supplemented with five contemporary panels, are one generation removed, both in time and in relation to material. This migration from analogue to digital mirrors the shifting purposes of the very sites the series names. In this panel, the words Heart Mountain appear across a softly clouded ground, invoking the WWII incarceration camp in Wyoming where over 14,000 Japanese Americans were detained. As the artist has observed, there are “celebrated sites such as Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls,” and there are others “mostly hidden from our view.” The very title Archipelagoes underscores the political implications of fragmentation, suggesting a chain of disconnected sites linked by histories of exclusion and state power. Yamaoka’s work anchors this hidden history in language while simultaneously allowing it to drift into abstraction.

panel 14
Archival pigment print
20 × 16 in.
Edition 1 of 3

This panel of Carrie Yamaoka’s Archipelagoes resists naming altogether, offering a burnished field of golden-brown tonalities that recalls a weathered map or eroded terrain. By withholding words, it draws attention to surface, process, and instability—themes at the heart of Yamaoka’s practice. The original photograms of the 1990s, made without a camera through direct manipulation of light and chemistry, have themselves deteriorated from exposure to air and time. In contrast, the archival pigment prints of 2019 revive their imagery with vivid freshness. Yet they are not mere reproductions: they are a “re-iteration of the original idea, made in a different moment,” acknowledging both distance from and continuity with the analogue source. Like the carceral landscapes Yamaoka references—sites that are built, repurposed, and erased—the cycle itself migrates across generations of media. The title Archipelagoes resonates here, evoking not only island chains but also the dispersal of sites of confinement across the American landscape. Panel 14 becomes a space of silence, where history lingers in matter even when language recedes from view.

panel 16B
Archival pigment print
20 × 16 in.
Edition 1 of 3

In this panel of Carrie Yamaoka’s Archipelagoes, a list of names—Wallkill, Wildwood, Willow River, Winnebago, Woodland—emerges against a blurred gray background. Evoking rivers, forests, or pastoral places, these are also the names of prisons and detention centers. Here, as throughout the cycle, language is both anchor and veil: it confers a sense of place while masking histories of confinement and dispossession. Yamaoka’s digital re-iteration of the analogue series underscores this tension. Just as “the U.S. government moves material from one deployment or detention camp, repurposes it, and later places it in another site,” so too has Archipelagoes shifted across media, with each version refracting its subject anew. The abecedarium structure—partial, interrupted, and incomplete—mirrors the fragmentation of history itself. In its very naming, Archipelagoes signals the political geography of separation, a chain of isolated yet interconnected sites of power. Panel 16B crystallizes the cycle’s arc: an archipelago of words and silences where memory, exposure, and erasure continually reconfigure the American landscape.

Carrie Yamaoka (b. 1957, Glen Cove, New York) is an artist whose materially inventive practice spans painting, photography, and installation. Working with reflective polyester film, resin, and other industrial surfaces, she creates works that shift with changing light and viewer position, implicating perception as an active, temporal experience. Often beginning with photographic or drawn marks—scratches, erasures, or stains—her process embraces accident and alteration, allowing images to hover between emergence and disappearance. Yamaoka’s work has been exhibited internationally, with recent presentations at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Her work is held in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She is a co-founder of the queer art collective fierce pussy. In 2025, Yamaoka was awarded the prestigious Maria Lassnig Prize, recognizing her decades-long contributions to contemporary art. She lives and works in New York City.