Yashua Klos (1977, Chicago): I carve, ink, and hand press woodblock prints to make a library of source material for my collages.
Worktable, 2014.
About:
Yashua Klos challenges mainstream notions of masculinity and vulnerability with woodblock prints and paintings that examine masculine identity within the cultural context of his upbringing on the South Side of Chicago. The angular shapes and geometric planes in his work imbue the iconography with graphic poignancy and historical heft. Klos employs references to black cultural histories, mythologies and images of urban abandonment to gesture toward the monumental.
Yashua Klos received his MFA from Hunter College in New York and his BFA from Northern Illinois University. He has studied at the L’Atelier Neo Medici in Monflanquin, France, and is a past resident at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Klos has shown his work in galleries nationally and internationally including New York, Chicago, and Monflanquin, France. His works have been published in Daniel Parker’s African Art: The Diaspora and Beyond, featured in Essence Magazine and reviewed in the New York Times. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.( Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha/Courtesy Tilton Gallery New York)
www.yashuaklos.net
The Mountain of Crystal and Concrete/Meteor Mountain, 2009.
The Diagram of The Darkness Between Stars, 2013.
We kept what came to us, 2015.
Model of The Pyramid Temple on the South Side of Heaven, 2011.
“I carve, ink, and hand press woodblock prints to make a library of source material for my collages.
These pieces are the fragments that I cut and arrange to ‘build’ the planes in my images.
Usually, I’m layering them on top of a pencil drawing which acts as a blueprint, but this collaging deviates from my initial blueprint and takes on a life of it’s own.”
“ My work is really all about a certain stoicism I witnessed in Black folks in Chicago.
It’s also about a beauty that comes from adapting and thriving in that fractured relationship to America AND African-ness. But that stoicism is a kind-of survival thing.”
“In 2004 I saw my first Charles White woodblock print at the SouthSide Community Art Center, in Chicago where I’m from. I was enamored with his use of gesture! He rendered a humanity that had presence and durability.
Elizabeth Catlett and Emory Douglas were huge inspirations as well.”
(quotes out of interview in Art/ctualité with Polly Brock/March 2015)