Yung Jake "EMBEDDED"

Yung Jake
EMBEDDED
JUNE 1, 2024 - AUG 4, 2024
17 Pike Street

There are no wheels in nature. This is noteworthy because, when thumbing through the vast realm of human production, we are often found mimicking the natural world. Imitation. The wheel, then, is an anomaly—not in its form or function, but in its conception, confirming the human ability to imagine beyond environmental limitations, transcending the locally real for a quantum reality. Technology.

The first wheel was not used for transport but to spin clay into useful vessels. The broken remnants from this practice led to the creation of terrazzo—a composite of binder and aggregate, combining residual materials from various manufacturing strategies, shaved down to an even surface. Yung Jake’s pieces, constructed on Long Island at the start of this summer, echo this heritage.

In the series Embedded, found parts of mass-produced objects can be found, reversed to reveal an interiority, their design and construction on display. These elements are set in concrete slabs, hung on the wall as discrete tableaus, and polished to a smooth, candy-like finish.

They appear both heavy and airy at once.

Their inferred weights remind us that the human body is the most immediate measure of our relations to objecthood. It is no coincidence then that one of the first instances of what came to be known as assemblage, the sculptural practice of found objects combined together, was a bust. Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head (1918) is a wooden tailor's dummy with a tape measure, a tin cup, and among other things, a ruler affixed to it. Four decades later, Hasbro’s Mr. Potato Head appears on the children's toy market and could easily be the Kidz Bop version of Hausmann’s genre defining sculpture. Both evoke a specifically non-specific modularity, where any number of objects, meanings, feelings, or temporalities could fit or belong if the moment is right. Or wrong. The way an emotion could pass through a body or how any combination of spices could transform a humble tomato.

These works settle such differences. The ground-down forms elicit an ecstatic primacy, the emergence of an adult misrepresentation of childsplay. Such symbols of innocence are returned to the adult world where they originated from. They are not dysfunctional in their suspensions but otherwise exposed so that we might explore how they instead, function in the ‘dys.’

2024/05/31

Installation