BY ALFONSE CHIU
(Excerpt from the full article below)
Michaela Yearwood-Dan
Marianne Boesky Gallery
A gentle, pulsing vitality runs through the works of Michaela Yearwood-Dan. Lush and verdant, paintings such as Forgive you and forget you (2023) and It's gonna be alright this time (2023) all boast Yearwood-Dan’s floral flair and penchant for pulpy, pithy musings, that she inscribes upon the canvas. In the former, a spunky question, ‘Who gave you permission to rearrange me?’ hovers over the rich red of a flower, neatly tucked away in a small text box; in the latter, a delicate ‘It’s just the beginning’ traces the border of an emerald-green leaf. The effect is affective. Yearwood-Dan’s compositions, which channel influences as diverse as the cultures of Blackness, Queerness, femininity, and their attendant rituals, are bold but not overwhelming, rich but not indulgent, striking but not monolithic. Subtlety is the word: the botanical allusions that exist in Yearwood-Dan’s graphic vocabulary hide the political in the personal. Ubiquitous orange, pink, and purple hues bring to mind lesbian and bisexual pride flags as much as they do wild flowers, while swirls of brushwork that resemble carnations and pansies litter works such as La-dida (2023) with bright color bursts, evoking the sylvan charms of safe domesticity and the obscured Queer codes deployed in less progressive eras.
