Mike Yaniro

Mike Yaniro’s paintings, drawing and mixed-media works break down and de-contextualizes language and images to explore how we utilize them to make meaning. In his own words:

Technical, industrial, and commercial  applications of language contain a quality that's inherently modern. The compartmentalization of the subject is the true project of modernism. And there is a violence committed with every segmentation.

With an emphasis on the body, my project is to turn that attribute inward. Within modernism, the body is dismantled;  each part is categorized, stacked and assigned a specialist to study or maintain; the unified whole made unknowable. With these works I wanted to see that quality teased out by making monstrous appropriations of its form that I initially envisioned whenever I would encounter a version of its source in reality; for instance, old signs in a hospital  denoting each patient room, each medication room or even just the elevator. The scale of much of my work mirrors human dimensions, and when confronted with this spatially, my hope is to conjure up a unique psychosphere within the viewer, one that may be able to address more appropriately the problems of the human condition, especially as it stands now, in the wake of the failed modernist project.

Mike Yaniro (b. 1980, Willingboro, NJ) is an artist currently working in Brooklyn, NY. He has previously shown at Clifton Benevento, and Room East.