Our entire understanding of the world is built on associations—we see and believe in symbols and iconography, objects that represent a memory, a season, a person we once were. We base our past, and slowly, our entire lives on what we’re able to recall.

Los Angeles-based artist Brenna Youngblood has made an artistic identity out of breaking these associations, taking objects and images of everyday contemporary experience and shifting their meaning onto her canvas. In her exhibition at Roberts Projects, R.A..D…I..O., Youngblood displays nine new works, as well as older paintings, that take objects like Nilla Wafer boxes, coat hangers, gloves, and more, creating a new context for what might otherwise be considered trash.

R.A..D…I..O. materializes the margin between space and time, where mixed assemblages speak to the endlessness of form. “I utilize different modes of abstraction as a base to build upon. I enjoy artworks’ subtleties and rigidness simultaneously,” Youngblood explains. In “SUNSET,” a large, bright piece patterned with flowers, keyholes, twigs, and images of what looks like lambs on a farm, we observe a compression between spatial and temporal sensibilities in a stabilized assemblage, an ode to the sensibilities of Americana. Youngblood explains why this modality of creating works best: “I really enjoy creating fixed things. The static structure is so important. I want the viewer to feel as grounded as these works [do].” The temporality within her work speaks for itself—that the viewer might situate themself in the world at the same time her compositions are happening, that our experience transcends the 3D realm and instead warps with the images. “There is definitely an immediacy in my work,” she confirms.

On her influences, Youngblood shares, “I’ve always been impressed by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s composition. Nan Goldin’s subject matter and framing lends itself to that of paintings. Jasper Johns’ assemblages were daring then and are to this day.” Listing off these transformative imagemakers, Youngblood’s radar circles the experimental and imaginative worlds that uphold the American art canon—each artist serves different purposes in their roles, but a nature of deviancy comes through in all of these works. Perhaps that’s what we see in Youngblood’s work: a refusal to conform while maintaining a respect for form. As she toes the line between conflicting ideas, these tensions draw us further in. Her pieces aren’t always necessarily serious but take on serious ideas—visual signifiers of the American zeitgeist. She organizes perfectly the messiness of a meta-referential American visual culture as it exists today, the derivative quality of a growing monoculture, somehow constructing newness out of monotony.

In “X-RATED,” the robin egg blues narrate a passive resistance to the viewer. We’re enraptured, yet positioned at a distance away from the piece. Or in an alternative interpretation, perhaps the piece reaches out to us, inviting us into a sense of possibility, a feeling, a moment of one-to-one human connection. This is the common thread in her work—that these objects or representations of physical things offer us insight into who we are as humans. And perhaps that speaks to the critical part of her work—that American culture is most cogently embodied through the physical world, through the items we treat as extensions of ourselves in a capitalist monoculture. She speaks to a chaotic dialectical dilemma in her work, examining the push and pull among ourselves and our relationship to physical space. These tensions are heightened so much so, emphasized in Youngblood’s emphasis on rooted, idle mediums to do so, paralleling her commentary on temporality.

Youngblood hinges on the wrought sensibilities of American culture to create something new. As she challenges artifice, she negotiates between more meaning-oriented art and abstracted, ambiguous pieces that compel audiences to make personal connections to the work. She notes, “The balance is so important. Whether it’s actual language, titling, or the objects or images speaking, I want all aspects to be appreciated and understood. It’s really a whole package.” 

Most interestingly, Youngblood’s photographic endeavors in the exhibition are not merely visual representations of what she photographs, but simulacra of the actual things. These embedded images, like “BBD” or “GRAB” become one-to-one embodiments of the physical spaces or items they strive to represent. This throughline is also observable in her collage-based work: “When I started printing, I messed around with mirroring and collaging images of objects. I didn’t want to work with people’s faces or ethnic identity, I wanted the interpretation to read beyond African American, and wanted to be placed in an abstract or collage movement. Now I think people place me among assemblage artists.”

On the exhibition at large, she elucidates, “I like the conversation between older works and new paintings in the current show. The current body of work is quite refined and pointed. Those points are playfulness. The theme of home life is missing, it’s more about the larger world.” Youngblood pulls us through her world in R.A..D…I..O., as though we’re following her around the city, as though we pick out material with her, as she generates imagery with her camera. 

“OVERWATCH” calls on running themes in the exhibition like “social critique and signals of communication and miscommunication.” The piece is layered, an encapsulation of the exhibition—on her technique, she emphasizes, “...flowers are constantly in my work. This show began differently. I was trying to replicate flocked wallpaper, a mechanical vernacular print-making technique. I moved away from wallpaper toward stenciling, which is another way of mass producing a ready-made. These images, like photo prints, are easily repeated. Flowers also symbolize the passage of time. Other markers of time can be seen in the planets and clocks in my photos.” “OVERWATCH” is a double entendre of sorts—obviously referential to the gaming world, more subtly and linguistically a tongue-in-cheek commentary on surveillance culture as a fundamental pillar of contemporary American reality. It’s genius.

She expands on social critique and communication as central to the ideological basis for the exhibition title, explaining, “The title R.A..D…I..O. insinuates this. I am also a fan of E.E. Cummings and his play with punctuation. I was also thinking of radiology.” 

Brenna Youngblood sets precedents and reinvents assemblage in R.A..D…I..O. As I peer at “puppet master (tip toe),” I feel a grave seriousness yet humor in her work—a commentary on post-irony, a culture’s arrested development, or maybe even a monologue on her art practice. It demonstrates a sort of childlike horror we don’t fully identify with until we see it. She indicates that maybe this exists within all of us, that maybe our reflections on our physicality help us work through these dichotomous phenomena.

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