A new show at the Albuquerque Museum features 10 artists exploring how their unique relationships to the landscape comes out as abstraction in their work.
Among the artists featured in “Abstracting Nature” is sculptor Karen Yank, and the work of her mentor, legendary painter Agnes Martin. She will give a talk July 13 about her work and her relationship with Martin. Yank talked with KUNM about her work and how she and Martin were drawn to New Mexico from other places.
KARENYANK: It created a bond. When we first met, right away, we talked about how much we loved the landscape in New Mexico and how much the big open vistas kind of really affected our emotional well-being and our stability and our sense of quiet so that we could focus on our work. But she was really adamant that her work was not about nature. And I want to actually quote something that I just love that she wrote. She used to write poems a lot, and they're all about nature, about trees and leaves and things like that. And she says “My poems, like my paintings, are not really about nature. It is not about what is seen. It is what is known forever in the mind.” And that's exactly how I felt about what I was trying to achieve in my work. When I met her, I was trying to express emotional content, not actually represent nature, seeing the mountains or seeing these objects, it was more I wanted to give that uplifting inspiration that I felt in the landscape. And so really, what we were trying to achieve is our own emotions, our own inspirations.
So what she did was she taught me how to meditate, waking meditation. She was like, “You need to be able to do it whenever you want, on demand.” So she taught me this very, very structured form of meditation where I just quiet my mind, and then I wait for inspiration to come in and I ask my own mind questions, and she believed that our brains are so much more powerful than we allow them to be. We use our intellect and we kind of negate how it is able to tell us the truth without us figuring it out. So opening your mind, asking you questions like, what will I make next? What really matters most to me?
KUNM: Can I ask about the whole idea of the show? When people have certain expectations when they're going to an art museum and nature is in the title, how will some of those assumptions by an audience be challenged?
YANK: As you enter the show, you see my work through the glass doors, and as you enter you see Agnes’ and my shared space. And I think they did that purposely to really challenge the viewer to say, “oh, wait a second.”
KUNM: Like, where's the nature?
YANK: Yeah, but they do such a good educational job that they interviewed us and we did writings, and they have them all on the wall so you can read about it and understand. But every time I've stopped in, I've had questions from the people, like they figure out who I am, and then they start asking questions. Even the security guards ask me lots of questions, and so people are very curious. But as you move into the space, it becomes a little softer, and a little bit more of what an average person might think is abstract nature, which is [Richard] Diebenkorn and our beloved Emmi Whitehorse, who everyone loves in New Mexico and then Joan Weissman -- she does ceramics and fiber art, so she's actually using the land in her work, which is very interesting. The other thing to mention about Joan is that her and I both do public works.
KUNM: And so in terms of your talk you'll be talking about?
YANK: I will be focusing only on my own work, our teachings, so to speak. At the end of Agnes’ life, two things she wanted to say to me before she passed is she was wrong about the isolation not even thought years ago, I see films of her talking and saying how much she enjoyed it, but somehow she had a revelation at the very end of life, and she said, “Don't do that. Don't do that. Live life to the fullest. Just live, live.” And then the last thing was, she asked me if I could keep her teachings alive, or our teachings. She said, “If I could keep our teachings alive.” She picks her words very carefully. She speaks very minimally and so when she sai “ours” I asked her about that, and she said, “Well, you've developed your own inspiration, your own direction, but using similar tools, and we do have a kinship in our outcome of our pieces.”
