Written by Amelia Winata

Amelia Winata explores Monash alum Paul Yore’s survey exhibition, WORD MADE FLESH, examining the maximalist logic and embodied methodologies that drive his work.

The aesthetic of Paul Yore’s WORD MADE FLESH might be crudely summed up as the love child of New York’s Times Square and a country op shop. In his works, Yore folds bold colours, advertising imagery, mass produced objects and representations of celebrity icons into tapestries and needlepoints made by the artist himself. The tension between the fast-paced subject matters – representative, among other things, of the internet age and 24-hour news cycle – with Yore’s very slow-paced, embodied making methods is what makes Yore’s practice so immediately recognisable as his own. And what also makes it such a dense and tangled practice to decipher.

And Yore’s intense productivity was on full display in WORD MADE FLESH, with many works hung salon style – that is, with rows of works stacked on top of one another. This ‘more is more’ attitude was in many ways a metaphor for the post-internet age. In the first gallery, the viewer was greeted by a vast collection of relatively small, some would say domestically scaled, needlepoints – the content of which upended the domestic logic of the medium. Upon closer inspection (and the scale of the works did require up-close viewing), the viewer was confronted with slogans such as SHOVE IT UP YOUR ARSE (SHOVE IT UP YOUR ARSE, 2017) and SEE YOU IN HELL (SEE YOU IN HELL, 2017) masquerading as almost child-like graphics – a lure for the off-guard gallery visitor. Indeed, this first room set the tone for WORD MADE FLESH as a series of contradictions that, in many ways, encapsulates our present moment in a globalised, post-national world.

This maximalist logic only gained momentum as the viewer continued their journey through WORD MADE FLESH. In a smaller gallery, largescale applique works – many a couple of metres in height – were hung on pink walls up to the ceiling, making it impossible for the viewer to apprehend everything on display. These works were in fact quilts and the title of the room, Embodiment, pointed to their corporeal logic. The quilt, after all, is a tool for protecting the body, for warming and comforting it. Despite this, and again here is the tension in Yore’s work, the imagery in the quilts was mostly anything but comforting. Representations of sexually explicit acts were married with garish Australiana, such as Blinky Bill with an erect ejaculating penis (WELCOME TO HELL, 2014), or derogatory representations of global political figures including Trump as Osama Bin Laden’s shitting anus (SPECTACULAR SPECTACULAR, 2016). If in these works Yore explores a dialectic between comfort and discomfort, then he doubles down on the use of dialectics through his choice of medium. As Helen Hughes states in the exhibition’s catalogue, the quilt format, which has historically been associated with female labour, is queered by Yore – not only by way of the homoerotic imagery he includes but also by his use of non-traditional, synthetic materials such as sequins and rhinestones.

The innumerable sub-themes in Yore’s work – homoeroticism, politics, Australian cringe and so on – are all part of the artist’s broader consideration of global capitalism and the attention economy. The common methodology across Yore’s oeuvre is that these sub-themes are patchworked together with bright colours and shiny materials to vie for the viewer’s attention. The result is that the viewer finds it all but impossible to properly focus on any one detail in Yore’s sea of glitz.

This came to a head in the final gallery – a cavernous, hangar-like space that occupies approximately half of ACCA’s entire exhibition area – where the newly commissioned installation WORD MADE FLESH sprawled like a debauched Las Vegas carnival. Enclosed in temporary fencing (the type you might see at a music festival), the installation was awash with flickering neon signs and lights. One could enter a room-sized cube covered in lit up insignia to discover mirrored walls covered with multiple rows of television screens, each displaying a mashup of memes, pornography and multinational logos, such as the McDonald’s golden arches. On the wall label for the commission, Yore stated that the work was conceived around “the deconstructive logic of collage, centring on an endless dismantling and reconfiguring, a dually destructive-creative act in which a great diversity of disparate waste and found materials are brought together in uneasy connection.” Indeed, as I stood in Yore’s video room, it dawned on me that I was not so much viewing narrative-based or even time-based footage but, rather, a constant repetition of images that had very little in common apart from the fact that they were enmeshed in the broader backdrop of late-capitalism. The work’s crudeness came largely down to what Yore described as a collage-like deconstruction – the refusal of any meaningful bond between images and signs.

If WORD MADE FLESH started with Yore’s arguably ‘quieter’ works (in scale if not content) – his small tapestries – then the exhibition quickly picked up speed, with the overwhelming intensity of the new commission, which concluded with a mid-‘80s Ford Falcon hearse mosaiced with mirrored tiles, possibly gleaned from a disco ball. A hammer and sickle, a rainbow flag and the words FUCK AUSTRALIA and WHITE TRASH appeared. At the rear of the car, Yore carefully mosaiced the words FUCK ME DEAD with the face of a sex doll modelled around the keyhole stylised as the doll’s mouth. Here, even Yore’s slogans acted as images. Built from the same tiles as the figures represented on the car, they had a ‘thingness’ about them, whereby they became signs instead of text. Indeed, aren’t Yore’s works the ultimate sign of the time? They represent the constant struggle between the intense pace of daily life and the fantasy of slowing down. Even Yore’s vintage car, a symbol of Australian nostalgia, was ultimately subsumed to pictures, simply another canvas for the inescapable image economy.

Paul Yore is a contemporary artist who lives and works on stolen and unceded Gunaikurnai country in Gippsland. He graduated from Monash University with a Bachelor of Arts (Archaeology and Anthropology) and a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) in 2010.

Amelia Winata is a Narrm/Melbourne based writer. She is a founding editor of Memo Review.