Yoko Ono

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce its third exhibition of work by Yoko Ono. The show will include both recent and historical photographic work, as well as several of Ono’s films.

Ono’s work demands the participation of her audience, denying the idea that the creative process ends when the actual artwork is completed. Instructions for Photographs, (1961 - 1971) and Instructions for Films, (1964 - 1969) provide a framework for the viewer’s own enactment of a specific project. The spectator becomes collaborator, removing the artist from the creative process and allowing a wide audience to participate in art making - whether imaginary or actual.

The spectator is forced to relate to the actual work of art by different means in Vertical Memory. Comprised of twenty-one identical portraits accompanied by different texts, each new context alters the meaning of the photograph. The portrait itself is a composite image of three photographs: father Ono Yeisuke, husband John Lennon, and son Sean.

Ono uses digital manipulation to distance the photograph from its status as a mirror on reality. By altering the image, she disassociates the photograph from the photographer and again places the burden of the creative act on her audience. Nine Memory Paintings encompass images from different time periods and nationalities, allowing the viewer’s imagination to play over a multiplicity of meanings and associations.

Fifteen images of a woman’s breasts and pubis hang from the ceiling, each titled Mommy Was Beautiful. The viewer gazes upward, jolted out of a passive consumption of these canvases through their placement above the gallery walls. The piece also recalls the view of a breast-feeding infant, a sentiment of hope that is characteristic of much of Ono’s work.

Yoko Ono’s retrospective, YES YOKO ONO, is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art June 22 through September 8, 2002.

Pressetext

Yoko Ono