Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present Boomerang, a solo exhibition by Kansas City based artist Mikey Yates, opening on January 14 between 5-7pm at the Holland Park space (10 Portland Road) as part of a joint opening across our spaces.

If Mikey Yates’ first solo exhibit at Taymour Grahne Projects expressed lockdown sentiments in the form of Love Letters, then Boomerang is an extended diary entry. Wrought with careful observations, pauses, and quiet deliberations, Yates invokes the reflections, shadows, and artifacts that haunt the physical and mental terrain of the places we call home. Reminding us that though families and loved ones may move or grow apart, the true construction of home supersedes physical structure. In Boomerang, Yates pays homage to the questions asked but not spoken and the memories and objects we choose to make sacred—the pieces of home that we return to time and time again.

While objects provide departure points for reflection, Yates imposes literal reflections as well. In Inside Out, his wife is seen looking out from a porch while a figure (Yates) is visible in the glass. An inside table provides comfort in the form of various chosen objects, secure against external elements, while the outside view features an eerie evening light. The same yellow is seen in Self portrait in Kansas City, windswept trees and a cold blue sky dominate the background while the artist soberly stares into the car window. Cars are featured in both paintings, and the automobile is the exclusive subject of I-35 South, driving into the night sky turned alien landscape. The theme of travel suggests a transition in this stage of life, an uncertain future, a reflection of the perennial question asked by a lifelong nomad: am I home yet?

Yates provides clues to the question while evading any definitive answer. Though the uniform architecture of the army base provides an uninspiring exterior, internal blank walls make excellent canvases. In Keith and Kris’ Room the vibrant posters contrast with drab yellow walls, revealing youthful dreams as his brother sleeps. In a world where one has little control over external circumstances, decorating a room becomes a practice of expression and autonomy, vital in homemaking and identity building. The choices of the posters in Keith and Kris’s Room speak to their desire for individual identities, their likes, and tastes. In Mother and Child, a kaleidoscope of colorful objects are carefully integrated together, creating a unified installation in the form of a living room.

The same room is featured as a cozy setting in Independent Reading Time. In all three, Yates’ highlights the role of art in transforming a blank wall or empty space into home. Everyday objects are potent pieces of art: a favorite mug serves not just a warm cup of coffee but a memory, a painted pot is a reminder of a country far away. Understanding rooms as spaces for imaginative potential, Yates acknowledges the role of his own parents as artists as well, each accompanying his work with individual pieces as Mom around my age and Dad around my age.
Rituals such as the seasonal changing of pillow covers picked out by his mom, or the way his dad decides to arrange furniture in the living room to facilitate family functions after each move become important acts in constructing Yates’ inner world, an inspired space where creativity can flourish. In Like Home, his wife cuts fresh flowers while the window provides a glimpse of a bleak and snowy night. Away from his biological family, the act of arranging flowers in their Kansas City apartment exemplifies the importance of art-making and the function of art in creating an inner world.

Through a series of works highlighting the internal warmth of home, Yates expounds what poet Essex Hemphill describes as the “domestic repetition of beauty that is found in caring for and being cared for” by loved ones. Home is not an address but a practice to be cultivated, a grounded reality tended by the beauty of domestic repetition over time. It is a worn couch, sleeping in on a weekend (Keith and Kris’ Room), two brothers watching tv (Big Brother Little Brother), a lazy afternoon nap with the dog (Afternoon), or a cozy recliner for his brother to read while his mother naps nearby (Independent Reading Time). Yates’ subject focus on lounging, his emphasis on rest and relaxation are subversive in a culture fixated on movement and production, especially on an army base. Military communities are built with the sole intention of mobilization and deployment. Yates’ draws heavily on the army base as a setting. He gives us a glimpse of external yellow army base architecture through the window of Keith and Kris’ Room, and more pronounced in both Imaginary Defenders I and II. The structure of army bases are intrinsically utilitarian: the Barracks, commissary, dining facility, medical clinic—each building facilitates the movement of soldiers and their families. In addition, military life depends on a depersonalization of the self; soldiers wear the same uniform. Choices are limited if nonexistent, from the length of a haircut to the layout of military housing.

The internal spaces of both the mind and the building then become critical sites to rebel against such order. Yates’ paintings are heavily invested in what constitutes a home. In a similar way that diarist Anais Nin describes her need to write in order to “create a world of my own...like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe.. and recreate myself when destroyed by living” Yates shows how art turned the physical structures his family inhabited into homes. In Boomerang, he offers us a view of the rooms of the past and present as he experiments in his Kansas City apartment he shares with his wife (Inside Out, Afternoon). Yates give us a glimpse of the army bases where he grew up constantly on the move, a process that involved news schools, countries, friends and addresses. In his works he draws on the way art aids his survival by giving him a space he could control. He uses windows, boundaries from the inner to outer worlds, that show the separation of what can and can’t be controlled. Frequently they emphasize contrasts such as his brother blissfully asleep while a military aircraft is outside in Keith and Kris’ Room. Fresh flowers provide color against an outside snowy night in Like Home. An unfamiliar sky contrasts with a set of familiar objects in Inside Out.

On the other side of the window, outside from the comfort zone of inner spaces, Yates’ takes us to the basketball court in Imaginary Defenders I and II, a site for both play and conflict. A departure from “home” activities, Imaginary Defenders I and II showcase movement, hurried, jagged, outdoors and under the sky, rendering us suddenly vulnerable. The shadowy figures are faceless, limbs outstretched in emotive postures demanded by the sport. In ancient Greece, shades were understood as spirits and ghosts of the dead. While they may not all represent literal death (some quite possibly do—death by war or suicide as a result of war is not uncommon on an army base), the figures suggest the transitory nature of people and relationships in the military. The use of shadows points to instability, the inconsistency of relationships, the speed at which friends can fade into memories under the summer sun of a last day of school. We see the basketball player from behind, dribbling the ball, or perhaps ‘”traveling.” The move is his, and we are there to follow, held in suspense to follow him to the basket. While basketball is a team sport, the paintings evoke the feeling of playing alone.

Compare this to Afternoon, where mellow greens, blues and whites blanket the viewer with a tranquility complete with a sleeping dog warming his wife’s feet. In Big Brother little brother, one brother watches TV while he leans on the other who is asleep, neither seem to be conscious of each other; affection is both natural and nonchalant. A seamless serenity arrests the viewer. It is in these paintings that Yates’ provides us with ultimate value of home. Home is a place to recharge and be ourselves in a world that demands both our energy and conformity, a culture that emphasizes consumption and clicks over activities that allow us to slow down and reflect. Boomerang is at once a trip back into time, and a reach to hold on to the people, places and objects that make us feel home as we move into an uncertain future.

-Billy Yates