Jason Yates
Jason Yates (born 1972 in Detroit, Michigan) is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Education Yates got his BFA from the University of Michigan in 1995 and his MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA in 2000. Early career / Fast Friends Inc. Yates's early work in the late 1990s to the mid 2000s, was typified by a collaborative ethos and bridging the gap between various genres, namely art, music, fashion and design. Raised in Detroit and while still in his teens, Yates became a friend and collaborator with funk/jazz/ fusion musician George Clinton. Speaking about Clinton and the musician's influence on his own practice, Yates says "I always thought of Clinton not as a musician but as a total artist. As much as the art world endeavours to branch out, it's still very specialized. To Clinton, making art was part of his normal trajectory. He was an artist-musician. And I always saw art as being a component of a lot of different movements and incredibly dependent on a group dynamic." This way of thinking was a formative influence on his Yates' practice. After moving to Los Angeles to study with Mike Kelley, Mayo Thompson and Liz Larner in the MFA program at Art Center, Yates formed 'Fast Friends Inc.' a collaborative project to disseminate art outside the conventional gallery system and to distribute the work on the artist's own terms. Chris Kraus writes in Where Art Belongs "Yates is an exceptional artist. For six years as Fast Friends he created band posters for Ariel Pink, (Matt) Fishbeck (of the band Holy Shit) and others that are also original art works. Any study of the confluence between music and visual culture in the last two decades would cite Yates' work". The Fast Friends art works, which double as functional concert posters, are works on paper with mixed media and have been described as "each a colorful psychedelic explosion of creatures, captions, and hundreds of stickers" and "rough drawings and graphic riffs push to a visual density that quickly becomes a blur of coloured pencil and grotesque figuration. A central figure or head, ranging from fanciful creatures to Captain Beefheart, anchors the composition, and little droves of colour file out and disperse around the head, almost like oceans of saints around the godhead in Byzantine mosaics." In the work Shit Age (2007), "witchy pyramid triangles cut out of Mylar surrounded by rivers of watery brush strokes are infested with animal eyes, pot seeds and pills like buried in gobs of glittery glue...the deranged menagerie seemingly supported on a nest of hatched lines. Weed green rods of lightning burst out of the sky". Describing these works, Yates says they "were all infused with inside jokes, inside critiques, inside information". The "hatched lines" and Mylar, Kraus speaks of, will also reappear in Yates' more formal, pared down paintings. The Fast Friends inc. works were shown in the exhibition "Burnout, The Fast Friends Inc. Project, A Depiction