Photographs by Marc Yankus
By Brian Paul Clamp
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Call to mind the contentedness of the slow drift into a particularly wistful daydream; or the pleasurable haze when waking from a profoundly sound sleep. These mysterious points of intersection, moments when reality and illusion plausibly overlap, are the subject of Mark Yankus’ elegant imagery. Capturing the inevitable serenity of all sorts of gentle transitions is at the heart of the artist’s creative pursuit.
Yankus eloquently writes:
I am especially fascinated with the city in its rare moments of tranquility—as it sinks into slumber, as it rouses itself to face a new day. At such times the city is all abstraction—looming shapes, diffused light, spectral shadows. In these moments of transient repose, when its elements are briefly cloaked in softness, a kind of beauty envelopes even the most mundane street scene . . . and my work aims to capture that ineluctable quality.
The city shrouded in clouds of darkness occasionally punctured by brilliant points of sparkling light—it is at these moments a seemingly magical place pregnant with unbounded possibility. Love, loss, the promise of adventure, and the allure of danger . . . such are the objects of Yankus’ obsession. Like a longing, perhaps never quite fulfilled, these images speak of the pleasure of that inextinguishable pang and never ending pursuit.
A previous exhibition of Yankus’ photography was entitled, “Time and Again,” taken from the name of Jack Finney’s classic novel, also a love ballad dedicated to New York City. Traveling between the present and the past, the narrator layers years upon the next, constructing a collage in which the old exists along with the new. As the city itself is a layering of decades upon decades—brownstones set against vast towered back-drops of shining glass and steel—Yankus assembles his photographs in a similar style. Originally trained as a painter, the artist began constructing collages over twenty years ago. Eventually, he began to fold his own photographs into his work, and then, with the advent of digital technologies in the early 1990s, the artist devised a new kind of layering on the computer screen. Beginning with his own soft-focused digital images shot on the streets of the city where he was born and raised, Yankus overlays the photographs with various textures, including scratches and dings from the surfaces of old, flea market tintypes or with textures from blank pages of yellowing, musty books. Like Finney’s story, Yankus’ photographs paint the present through a scrim of the past. As if waking from a dream, still caught in the netherworld of a liminal state, memories and fantasies are just as real and tangible as the pillow beneath one’s head.
Alfred Stieglitz’s early twentieth-century photographs venerating New York’s impressive, new skyscrapers—symbols not only of capitalistic prosperity, but of the future itself—taken from the vantage of windows high above the earth, are also love letters to a place. However, stylistically Yankus’ images are much more akin to the painterly, Impressionist-inspired photographs of the Photo-Secessionists with whom Stieglitz was originally allied and from whom he ultimately separated in favor of a more “modern” aesthetic.
Facile contemporary references are the blurry cityscapes of David Armstrong and Bill Jacobson, of course, but the rough, scraped surfaces unite Yankus’ signature patina with visceral, emotive images by such Boston School artists such as the Starn Twins and Mark Morrisroe. And especially in Yankus’ portraiture (examples of which are included in this exhibition but not reproduced in the catalogue), the yearning sensuality of another Boston School photographer, Jack Pierson, is certainly a source of inspiration.
Hushed, introspective, and at turns even melancholic, this body of work is ultimately a reflection of the artist’s personal past and his passage into the present time. Indeed, Yankus has written of his work, “These are quiet cityscapes filled with memories.” As it is said, if only these walls could talk . . .
Appropriately, the title of this essay and show derive from an enigmatic dream the artist recalled from a few months past in which he was offered the phrase, The Point of Secret. While literally inexplicable, the strange snippet seems to get at the heart of Yankus’ overall vision.
Commenting upon an exhibition of Yankus’ photographs mounted in Seattle in 2007, critic Nate Lippens muses upon the abstracted memories latent in the artist’s work:
. . . those that slipped away, the missed opportunities, the secondhand accounts of lost weekends. Even the blank page holds promise and, just as easily, regret.