Artist: Mamie Tinkler
Exhibition title: Yorick in Space
Venue: Tops Gallery, Memphis, US
Date: October 28 – December 17, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tops Gallery
Yorick appears in Shakespeare’s Hamlet only as a skull and as a fixture in Hamlet’s memory. What’s left of any of us, eventually, but our bones and the memories of the living? In life, Yorick was a clown: a fellow, Hamlet tells us, of ‘infinite jest.’ Death plays as comedy here.
The paintings in Yorick in Space are set in a far-off galaxy, or the distant past, or a place entirely imagined, or after-hours at the theater, or in an artist’s studio, or in the artist’s mind. None of it is real, except that all of it is real. The characters play their roles on uncanny stages instantly recognizable as objects, places or situations, but conduct themselves nonsensically. Too concrete to be fantasy, too absurd to be true, the images function instead as a kind of object-theater, both comedic and dramatic. Vanitas painting (a sub-genre of still life) has always had a broad brief: commenting on the very nature of mortality and the inevitability of death. Do these paintings suggest an afterlife in space, or the afterlife of art? Can vestiges paint?
Enter Yorick, a sheep skull purchased in a thrift store. Yorick is a painter, an admirer of Guston, a bit of a drama queen. Yorick’s painting arm is a horse’s jawbone, his brush an antler. His palette is ‘rainbow chiaroscuro.’ Yorick stares in the mirror, considering the relevance of self-portraiture in the selfie era.
Enter also Hand, who once modeled cheap rings in a jewelry store. Now too an artist, a magician, a conjurer, a jester, a vaudevillian. Hand poses dramatically back-lit before a velvet curtain, suggestively cradling a phallic feather. Hand paints with a burning candle, winking: it’s a drip painting! Hand applies clown makeup and steps into the spotlight.
