Houses and Fences

The pairing in the title—dwelling and its perimeter—announces the central concern of the print: thresholds and what marks them. Plate reduction lithography is a progressive technique in which a single plate is printed, then partially erased or grained back, and printed again, so each successive color layer is generated from what remains of the prior state. The method enforces irreversibility: areas removed cannot be recovered, and the edition size is fixed by the first run. For Yokoo the technique suits a subject built around boundary and loss, since the image's construction enacts the same logic of subtraction it depicts. Houses define interior; fences articulate the seam between private ground and the street. The print belongs to the 2017 group in which he repeatedly worked the house-fence vocabulary, drawing on the suburban Melbourne vernacular he had lived among as a student. The reduction process, slower and less forgiving than multi-plate work, produces the muted, sedimented surface characteristic of his lithography.