The Embodied Minds of YoYo Lander
I’ve often worried that my body reveals more about me than I want to express. I become self-conscious and get socially anxious when I think about how my body speaks for me, betraying me and my thoughts, even as I sit silently. My half bitten nails and port wine stain splotching my left leg like a fading sunburn tell the plot of a story about me I don’t want told, with my mis-buttoned oxford shirt and unkempt hair filling in some of the details between. Sometimes I’m hyper aware of it, thinking of my body as a billboard advertising my most intimate insecurities to passersby, and sometimes I forget about it altogether in the same way I forget that I’m breathing.
For self-taught artist YoYo Lander, bodies speak louder than words. From her series Time Off that explores black women in private and vulnerable situations to Onto Something that depicts the same nude model in nine different positions hiding her face from view, Lander creates an ode to the black human form. Each slightly smaller than life-sized work is composed of cut watercolor-stained shards of paper that celebrate the artist’s love of tie-dye. Layered over one another to create height and depth as if the figure were jutting out of the surface, the cut-outs also make their flesh look tender, the perimeter of each cut paper looking like a thin scar. Illusionistic and genre-defying, Lander’s works are both realistic and abstract, collage and painting. Just like her works can’t be compartmentalized, neither can her subjects—the hand-blended browns, blues, and reds are a reminder of the multiplicity of narratives and backgrounds that compose the black community.
Time Off, YoYo Lander
Her series Bruised Bananas are Sweeter is personal and imaginative as it brings to life Lander’s recollection of her father before he suffered a traumatic brain injury that bound him to a wheelchair and caused him severe memory loss. Illuminating his athletic build and depicting him mid-handstand, Lander immortalizes her father as a young, strong, and silly person, at face value an entirely different person from the one who has required around the clock medical attention since she was seven years old. “The nakedness… represents my father being stripped of his physical and mental capabilities… When everything is stripped away, who are we?” writes Lander. While this series might read as a lament for the person her father once was, Lander illustrates her father’s essence, which hasn’t changed despite his physical impairment.
Bruised Bananas are Sweeter, YoYo Lander
Similar to Lander, I also grew up with a father who needed 24/7 aid. From a young age, I had helped my father get dressed in the mornings, sitting on my knees and pulling his socks over his swollen feet, helping him stumble from his bed into his wheelchair, and bringing him bland food that followed his prescribed low-sodium diet. I can’t really remember a time when my dad could swiftly walk on his own two feet. It seemed like for the short time our lives overlapped, his health was in constant flux from bad to worse and back to bad again. Because I only knew a time when my dad was ill, I had carved an immortal halo around him that for some reason convinced me there wasn’t anything he couldn’t survive. But maybe that’s just the denial all fifteen-year-olds reserve for their parents.
Admiring Lander’s figures of her dad’s sturdy body, I can’t help but wonder how I would choose to piece together my own dad. There are a handful of photos of my dad as a young man that I had studied so intensely I could easily mistake them for memories of my own in the same way I believe the stories I repeat to myself. One photo in particular shows him shirtless and hunched over looking out to sea on his sailboat—he was darker with a muscular build and a full head of gray locks. That is the dad I want to remember—adventurous and seafaring, all-encompassing.
After seeing some of Lander’s collages in person, I couldn’t help but notice how they emanate a religious aura as they recall the icons of saints looming on church walls—except that Lander’s “icons” are remarkably and refreshingly human. Where saintly icons look at us with stern judgment, pushing us away, Lander’s figures turn their backs on us, prompting us to approach them out of empathy. Lander uses the human body as a symbol to illustrate the nuances of the human psyche, encouraging us to treat them not as framed works of art but as boundless living beings.
