+0

ClampArt is pleased to announce the opening of “The Point of Secret,” Marc Yankus’ second exhibition of photographs at the gallery. 
 
In his newest body of work, Yankus explores mysterious points of intersection—moments when reality and illusion plausibly overlap.  Think of a daydream or the haze when waking from a particularly sound sleep.  Such gentle transitions are the subject of the artist’s recent photographs.  Yankus eloquently writes:
 
“I am especially fascinated with the city in its rare moments of tranquility—as it sinks into slumber, as it rouses itself to face a new day.  At such times the city is all abstraction—looming shapes, diffused light, spectral shadows. In these moments of transient repose, when its elements are briefly cloaked in softness, a kind of beauty envelopes even the most mundane street scene . . . and my work aims to capture that ineluctable quality.”
 
Just as the city is a layering of decades upon decades—brown-stones set against vast towered backdrops of shining glass and steel—Yankus assembles his photographs in a similar style.  Originally trained as a painter, the artist began constructing collages over twenty years ago.  Eventually, he began to fold his own photographs into his work, and then, with the advent of digital technologies in the early 1990s, the artist devised a new kind of layering on the computer screen.  Beginning with his own soft-focused digital images shot on the streets of the city where he was born and raised, Yankus overlays the photographs with various textures, including scratches and dings from the surfaces of old, flea market tintypes or with the subtle paper patterns from blank pages of yellowing, musty books, effectively melding the present and the past.
 
Marc Yankus’ fine art and publishing experience span a period of more than twenty-five years. Yankus’ work has been included in exhibitions at The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Exit Art, New York City; and the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.  His artwork has graced the covers of books by Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, and Alan Hollinghurst, among many others.  His images have also been used for theatrical posters for such acclaimed Broadway shows as Jane Eyre; August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom; and John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Doubt.  Yankus’ work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.