YIN-YANG — Tinney Contemporary

The title of this exhibition is the Taoist symbol of Yin-Yang, which acknowledges opposing forces but also presents the importance of harmony and balance. I was introduced to the symbol as a teenager in the 1990's when it abruptly found its way into popular American culture. It was scrawled with Sharpies alongside peace symbols and that weird "S" on notebook covers and backpacks. So personally, it has a nostalgic, perhaps even tongue-in-cheek connotation. This nuance is reflected in the varied approaches represented by the works included in this exhibition: some are serious, some are funny, many manage to be both at once.

All 0of the works in this exhibition are black, white, or a combination of both. I am interested in these stripped-down formal parameters—the extremities of contrast of black and white as constraint. Without color to provide context, works implementing only monochromatic visual components rely on composition, technique, and subject to narrate. It's a self-imposed limitation that I find fascinating.

Conceptually, black and white as a dichotomous pair have age-old meaning—opposing forces, light and dark, good and evil, truth and falsehood, right and wrong, etc. YIN-YANG complicates this binary opposition by depicting these supposedly contradicting forces as inextricable and interdependent.

-Joshua Edward Bennett