Will Yackulic

Time of My Life

I remember driving in cars and doing landscape paintings in my head (I still do that).

— Joe Brainard

A sign in the sky, a sign for a street, a sign in the snow. Will Yackulic’s new paintings largely depict traffic and other scenes of urban life, landscapes we encounter walking about or on the commute. A school bus, trash bags, milk crates, newspapers, orange cones and flashing lights collapsing the difference between still life and landscape. Hardly a person is in sight. The works are humanized instead by what people build, where they work, how they get around while going about everyday life. 

The paintings are a departure from the work Yackulic is known for: highly detailed, formal projects marked (quite literally) by an abundance of time. The new temporal metric brought on by parenthood meant such projects were no longer possible. The artist instead needed to avail himself of heretofore squandered moments between actions. Paintings previously done as meditations in between projects struck the artist as something he could develop into a practice. Looking for images that were, as he conceived it ‘indelible’, Yackulic began taking pictures of light and situations that struck him while going about his day. He sat and spent the remaining hours, after dinner and his daughter’s bedtime, revisiting the day. The resulting works represent a diary of his days in paint 

As Walter Benjamin observed of Proust, “Time reveals a new and hitherto unknown kind of eternity to anyone who becomes engrossed in its passing”. The compositions expand: a typical painting is fully balanced to its edge, not photographic but timeless. The process was, of course, made possible by the fact that we all carry a digital camera with us at all times. In fact, the scale of these works is slightly larger than a photo on your phone or exactly the size of your tablet. Contemporary objects of worship. And yet our phones and the overabundance of photos on them get lost, becoming perishable monuments of our daily life. Done mostly in a single sitting, Yackulic’s paintings play with that relation, capturing the moments shooting by.

— Rod Roland