Top image: Sohyun Yoon, Face Collage, 2021 Dimensions variable Digital video projection, found objects

The YB EH’s 

ROBERT GORDON RIDGWAY, SOHYUN YOON, PATRICK STOCHMAL, SOLSKIN BRASK

In the late 1980s, a group of artists came together to usher in a new and distinctive phase of art, one which celebrated an openness toward materials, shock value, and entrepreneurial attitude. Including, but not limited to, Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Angela Bulloch, and Grayson Perry, these artists came to be known as the Young British Artists (YBAs). Today, we see a new and exciting broadening of artistic practices, the likes of which parallel the YBAs ideals of embracing unrestricted materials and processes with which art can be made. Patrick Stochmal, Robert Ridgeway, Solskin (Ske), and Sohyun Yoon take up collective and individual identity, historical events, and social constructs that are examined from a modern perspective to reveal the underlying systems which sustain their structures. Like Hirst, Stochmal is interested in the cycles of life and death. His sculpture and performance-based work reconsider the self as an entity always spilling beyond the imagined boundaries that attempt to hold it contained. Ridgeway’s work takes after the Chapman brother’s subversive practice which often questioned the role of the artist and the purpose of “art”. By using sculpture to reconsider the social inequities of our culture, Ridgeway often reveals the complicity of the viewing audience to bring forth new understandings of political issues. Solskin and Perry share not only the artistic medium of ceramics but also a tendency to dissect reductive understandings of identity and gender. Like Perry, Solskin’s work is often autobiographical and politically challenging yet celebrates the hidden spaces where intimate stories and identities can play. Finally, Yoon employs biofeedback technology, similar to Bulloch’s works, to confront the viewer with images of themself and others. Like Bulloch, Yoon uses video, animation, sound, and light to explore pre-edited systems and the structures that make up contemporary aesthetics. In their installation, faces are continuously reproduced and distorted by the sounds made by the viewer and the local environment, revealing the interconnectedness of our constructed sense of self. Each of these artists, like their predecessors, takes up unique topics in varying ways. Reflecting the YBAs emphasis on the capacity for art to take every and any form, Stochmal, Ridgeway, Solskin, and Yoon use traditional mediums in new ways, asking questions which push us to question and accept ourselves, our society, and our histories. 

Essay: Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa
Curated: Morgan Mavis, Tibi Neuspiel