Brian Yates

Producing paintings and sculptures through assemblage, Brian Yates manages to create artworks of startlingly different emotional registers. For the paintings in his show “The New Anomie,” Yates took manila envelope–colored player-piano reels, with their obscure patterns of holes, as a starting point for collage canvases that layer antiquated technology, paint and tape. The mixed-media paintings strike a melancholy or even nostalgic note. The punch cards referenced here, for instance, are, like the reels, outdated curiosities that have long since been rendered practically useless, and are more likely to be found in science museum exhibits on computer history.

Though sharing the same method of construction, his sculptures are irreverent and mocking rather than wistful. In Welcome (to an Occupation), Yates attached a faux bomb made from spray-paint cans, black electrical tape and aquarium tubing to a cheap, Louis XV–style chair covered in dingy brown pleather. Underscoring a sense of the precarious and preposterous nature of the piece, the chair is wedged between a board and the wall about five feet off the gallery floor. The bomb-rigged chair is awkward, obviously constructed to be comic rather than realistic. It caused this viewer, who like everyone else is part of an interminable War on Terror, to laugh. The ersatz bomb slyly responds to and mocks the constant stream of news broadcasts  about explosive-packed cars, long airport security lines with nebulous rules about contraband, and a color-coded terror system that nearly everyone seems to ignore.—James Glisson