A spokesperson describes the event as follows:
“...Featuring nine new paintings alongside earlier works in assemblage and photography, R.A..D…I..O. demonstrates the breadth of Youngblood’s investigations into the complexities of American material culture. By incorporating mass-produced kitsch and objects of everyday use into her compositions, Youngblood reveals how specific registers of visual communication can be disrupted and broken down before being reconstituted into something altogether new.
With her unique process of assemblage and painterly abstraction, Youngblood’s work remains in dialogue with California’s rich history of assemblage and abstract expressionist artists including George Herms, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy and Betye Saar. Where Youngblood’s work departs from her predecessors’ is in the consistent use of and emphasis on objects, images and languages of contemporary life: materials found at home and on the street, images seen while shopping or scrolling through social media, words or phrases extracted from commercial or utilitarian contexts and remade via collage. The attention to the ready-made in these works—along with Youngblood’s longstanding use of photography and found images—are critically important elements that combine contemporary references, abstract forms and novel beauty.
In R.A..D…I..O., Youngblood continues to use typically discarded or overlooked images as anchor points within her mixed-media paintings, which now feature stenciled flower designs that provide a form of sculptural relief. Objects as varied as coat hangers, gloves and Nilla Wafer boxes are removed from their original contexts and made to function as units of form and color. Once deconstructed, these fragmented objects assume new meaning and significance within the visual fields that Youngblood creates. The deliberately constrained palette which characterized the artist’s previous works has been dramatically expanded to include yellows, blues, reds and blacks in a progression of tonalities that evoke the artificial and handmade in equal measure.
While her compositions and techniques of abstraction have grown more complex, Youngblood’s connection to the photographic image remains an important visual and conceptual reference. This is reinforced by the use of photographic imagery in the nine new works—including images created by Youngblood herself or ones she sources from the flow of digital imagery found online. Though we might try to recapture the original meaning of images in Youngblood’s paintings, the artist’s altering or fracturing of their forms makes such an attempt altogether impossible. Instead, she reveals the malleability not only of the materials and images around us, but ultimately of language and meaning as well…"
