Robert Yoder at Howard House - Seattle

Robert Yoder's recent solo exhibition was an advance on a number of fronts. Cut-up fragments of all sorts of things, notably construction-site road signs, have provided the unifying material theme in a body of work that has impressively accumulated over the years into an oblique commentary on the American built environment. Not literally painting but for the most part adhering to a rectangular paintinglike format, the 41-year-old Virginia native repeatedly confounds viewers' expectations. Bold and graphic on first impression, each collage or flat assemblage gradually reveals an intricate configuration of similar found elements recycled into delicate and harmonious compositions.

Yoder's strategies offer maximal references with minimal means. Whether concocted of humdrum sticker labels, cut-up magazine ads or strips of metallic tape, the collages shown here (averaging 16 by 20 inches) play flatness against spatial illusion. When he limits his colors to black and white (as in Karin, 2003, and Piper, 2002), Yoder's source of signage lettering is obvious. With multiple colors of reflective tape, the polygonal shapes take on the character of architectural drawings. Engle and Par Court (both 2003) extend the artist's vocabulary. The imaginative power of each centralized image is clearer without the sometimes strained allusions to linguistic disorder produced when letters in the works are only partially identifiable.

An increase in scale is seen in wall constructions that use children's plastic attachable building blocks and are usually limited to black, white and one or two other colors. The largest is Keeper Hill (2003) at nearly 5 feet square. While Yoder loses the tactile intimacy of the smaller metallic-tape collages, he gains stronger pictorial presence in these labyrinthine compositions. Another large work, Sunspots (2003), is a 4-foot-diameter circular collage of uniformly square or rectangular scraps of red, yellow and orange paper cut from magazine ads. Like the other works, Sunspots makes its presence felt gradually. Once the materials and process are apprehended, the overall image conveys its power.

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group