
Anicka Yi at Gladstone Gallery
May 31, 2022 — Jul 8, 2022
We get it: you’d rather maroon yourself on a desert island before attending one more round of Zoom drinks. And you’d be seriously grateful for the sand between your toes. But the harsh reality is that our future is one where nature and technology will be increasingly hard to separate. For Anicka Yi, this is a call to art. Her time spent in the Brazilian rainforest and along the Californian coast inspires her “techno-sensual” work, in which the purity of mother nature is corrupted, disfigured, transformed, and exalted by methods both high and low. One piece includes flowers fried in tempura, another features anemone-like shapes formed in foam and resin. For Yi, human anxiety and natural beauty can, must, and always will coexist.