Away (far)

The title evokes distance, perhaps emotional or geographic — a fitting concern for work made during Yokoo's Melbourne years, when displacement and the pull of an absent home were active subjects. Stone lithography supplies the medium's characteristic velvety blacks and graduated tonal washes, while chine-collé introduces a thinner sheet of paper bonded to the support during printing, producing a quiet contrast of surface and ground. The layered substrate functions almost like a window or a fragment of memory adhered to a larger field. Within Yokoo's practice the print belongs to a recurring meditation on bodily memory and the act of tracing — drawing as a way of holding what is no longer present. Compositionally, lithographs of this type tend to rely on negative space and incident rather than dense imagery, allowing the chine-collé element to register as a discrete event within a broader, more porous atmosphere.