Picket Fences

The print isolates the fence motif that elsewhere in the 2017 group accompanies house imagery, narrowing attention to the picket as a unit of repetition. Worked as a plate lithograph rather than from stone, the image takes advantage of the aluminum plate's even drawing surface, which holds fine vertical marks and graphite-like tones cleanly across the run. Picket fences—the suburban Australian vocabulary Yokoo lived among during his Victorian College of the Arts years—register here as a rhythm rather than as a depicted object: vertical members spaced against ground, creating a pattern that reads as both barrier and notation. The reduced subject pushes the image toward the diagrammatic, exposing his interest in tracing and seriality at its plainest. Within his wider practice the print operates as a study, isolating the boundary element from the dwellings it ordinarily encloses. Stripped of context, the pickets become marks—closer to the act of drawing a line than to the act of building a wall.