How do images and phrases become sticky with meaning, capturing the anxieties or beliefs of a cultural moment? Dena Yago explores this question in paintings that pair image and text. She draws inspiration from advertising, memes, classic cartoons, and the political comics of the Situationist International, a mid-20th-century avant-garde art movement.
Yago’s installation features close-up images of the Modern restaurant’s “Eggs on Eggs on Eggs” dish and a fried egg on a cobblestone street of Industry City, Brooklyn, a former industrial complex recently rebranded as a creative hub. The superimposed text “down for now / not for long” uses a font borrowed from Florent, a diner that opened in 1985 in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, then a center for artistic and queer communities, which shuttered in 2008 because of rising rents. “The paintings build on a previous body of work, which utilizes eggs as signifiers of temporal flux . . . sites of potentiality, life, and a form of—at first bounded, then released—excess,” the artist explains.
Organized by Jody Graf, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1.
