NADA Miami 2022

Yi To builds her canvases slowly, applying layers of thinned-down oil paint to stack and weave divergent patterns. Her compositions are made intuitively, revealed through fragments of form and color that exist within a “pre-narrative” state. Figures shape-shift within layered compositions that are thick with somatic memory. The use of marble dust and a restrained, earthy palette elicit worlds of archeology - carbon fossils and terrestrial bio-signatures; potsherd from antiquity; desert geo-glyphs; limestone reliefs, and the remnants of early cave-painting. Sedimentary striations give way to a taught, gossamer surface upon which isolated figures surface and fade, in a nonlinear narrative of decay and regeneration.