Window (re/production | re/presentation) is pleased to introduce What’s Right For Your Family?, a new work by San Diego-based artist Joe Yorty, conceived and produced specifically for Window | National.  Yorty’s contribution was curated by Amy Galpin, of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL, and Alexandar Jarman, of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. Yorty’s What’s Right For Your Family? is the third of three invited projects produced to be simultaneously on view in our original Asheville, NC storefront as well as five, satellite locations throughout the U.S. as part of this one-year public art project.

In an interview on the Little Paper Planes blog, Yorty describes his practice as:

[responding] to a material or object by thinking about memory and loss. This thinking occurs mainly with the early part of my studio process when I’m hunting and selecting materials for the work. I choose material through a visceral process rather than a rational one – these choices are almost always emotional. Once the materials are in my studio, though, the process takes a turn toward the more formal – I pick from the pile to arrange and rearrange and repeat until I’m content with it. The collage work happens in a more deliberate way, but that same process of selection and arrangement is still present. (Yorty

Project curator Alexander Jarman considers the origins of Yorty’s What’s Right For Your Family? as extending from:

[a] process of printing, photographing, and rephotographing [resulting in the creation of a work] that examines the tensions between public and private, formalism and chaos, and the vulgar and the beautiful. The imagery in Yorty's composition was sourced from yard sales, flea markets, swap meets, and the internet. While devoid of their original meaning, the photographs of toddlers and babies elicit new narrative content in the viewer's mind, and the juxtaposition of the pile of dirt conjures up a conversation about value.  This conversation extends to the context of this work––a retail window––which illuminates both the divides and the overlaps between cultural, monetary, and personal value. The overall composition of What's Right For Your Family? is not informal, but rather eschews symmetry to arrive at a more considered image that at once attracts and repels us.  The accumulation of found images provides accessibility for the viewer without offering straightforward legibility. These coexisting contradistinctions ultimately provide new strategies for representation in Yorty's work, conflating the physical with the image and the digital with the analog. (Jarman)

About the Artist

Joe Yorty is an artist who employs a range of materials and methods to make work that largely addresses the anxieties and absurdities of American domestic culture. His work has been shown on both coasts of the United States and some places in between. Joe received an MFA in Visual Art at UCSD in 2013. He currently lives and works in San Diego.