Anicka Yi

Anicka Yi creates tactile and fragrant sculptures, paintings, and installations, employing materials such as soaps, potato chips, milk, and hair gel, that play on the paradox between the enduring, timelessness of art, and ideas of impermanence. Her soap paintings act as a statement on the cosmetics and body-related industries, while their scents disrupt expectations of experiential art. By combining ingredients, she draws on associations and memories, such as that of a freshly scrubbed kitchen in Auras, Orgasms, and Nervous Peaches (2011), in which fragrant olive oils leak from the walls of a tiled room. She is interested in connections between materials and materialism, states of perishability and their relationship to meaning and value, consumerist digestion and cultural metabolism.