First Friday Opening Reception: November 5th, 2010, 6-9 p.m.
Golden Rule Gallery, 811 E. Burnside, Suite 122, Portland, OR 97214
Show runs November 2nd through November 28th

ARTIST STATEMENT

Lynn Yarne’s show Between Things and the Soul finds itself at the nexus of loss and wonder, the intersection between the shock of mortality and the strangeness of being anything at all. In a way, it’s a tense, tentative answer to a hypothetical posed by the poet John Berryman in his Dream Songs, 385; or if it is not an answer, her work carries the proposition already within it, enclosed as koan or buried principle:

If there were a middle ground
between things and the soul
or if the sky resembled more the sea…

In her pencil, gouache, or pen-and-ink drawings, Yarne is drawn to images of the dead—foxes, elk, tigers, wolves—in part because it is only in death that the tension between spiritual and physical being becomes apparent, that being divorces itself from the day-to-day and becomes impossible, metaphysical. A corpse is at once an object and yet something much more than itself; in life’s sudden absence the soul becomes omnipresent, suggests itself in everything.

Her pieces are an act of aesthetic suspension between oppositions, contradictions: loss and morbidity at once become serene beauty, concrete objects fold themselves out into abstraction; abstract shapes, in turn, appear to physically pierce an animal’s body, pin it fast to a blank cosmos.

Yarne’s abstract forms and forms intentionally left unfinished—perfection withheld, wabisabi-style, as if for divinity—move her pieces away from narrative and into a place of contemplation of being, the ways in which spiritual resonance accretes inexorably outside of ourselves: in light, form, texture, moment, landscapes of fur, a glassing eye, the rictus of an open mouth.

Lynne Yarne lives and works in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island.