Robert Youds

Silent Failing, 2026
cement, wood, latex paint, aluminum, dacron fabric
6’ W x 8’ L x 1’ H

Resist words, resist linguistic cliches, they kill hummingbirds - 2026
wood, plexiglas, vinyl, aluminum, canvas, acrylic/latex paint
16”H x 4” W x 12”D

Two things before you leave: please
(1 and 2), 2026
Plexiglas, aluminum, electrical, acrylic/latex paint
20”H x 11 “W x 9” D

Discs and Bundles, 2025 - 2026

More studies for better songs (1 and 2), 2026
aluminum, paint, micro glass bead, historical photographs

All the photons he has collected: your electrical face-A, 2025
8 ½” x 2 ½”  
Aluminum, canvas board, flashe paint, micro beads

All the photons he has collected: your electrical face-B, 2025
8 ½” x 2 ½”  
Aluminum, canvas board, flashe paint, micro beads

Flatpac studio future - A, 2025
11 ½” x 14” x 3”
aluminum, canvas, micro beads, flashe paint

Flatpac studio future - B, 2025
11 ½” x 14” x 3”
aluminum, canvas, micro beads, flashe paint

Pret-a-porter: waistline, 2025
27” x 18” x 10”
Cement, speakers, wood, Plexiglas, strapping, aluminum
Pret-a-porter: waistline - Detail

Faultline - 2025
24” x 10” x  2”
Aluminum, Plexiglas, cement
Faultline - Detail

Homeric - 2025
You know there was no one even around at the penitentiary of weak thought – so  loaded up my van and headed for home – just another beautiful dream
Chair, stool, lamp, Plexiglas, cement

Setdeck - 2025
A thousand impossible architectures against a set deck
2’ x 18” x 20”
aluminum, cement, strapping, plastic, Plexiglas
Setdeck - Detail

Jumped the Fence, 2025

She followed the mountain to the city 1 - 2025
23” x 20” x 9”
Aluminum, acrylic paint on Plexiglas

She followed the mountain to the city 2 - 2025
23” x 20” x 9”
Aluminum, acrylic paint on Plexiglas

Listen 1 Listen to the sound of history burning, 2025
3’ x 14”
aluminum, latex paint, canvas

Listen 2 Listen to the sound of history burning, 2025
3’ x 14”
aluminum, latex paint, canvas

Listen 2 - detail

Listen 3 Listen to the sound of history burning , 2025
18” x 14”
aluminum, latex paint, canvas

Uncutleaves 1, 2025
18” x 16”
aluminum, latex paint, canvas

Uncutleaves 1 - detail

She could no longer distinguish between near and far - A, 2025
23” x 17” x 2 ½”
Plexiglas, latex paint, vinyl, wood mount

She could no longer distinguish between near and far - B, 2025
23” x 17” x 2 ½”
Plexiglas, latex paint, vinyl, wood mount

She could no longer distinguish between near and far - C, 2025
23” x 17” x 2 ½”
Plexiglas, latex paint, vinyl, wood mount

She could no longer distinguish between near and far - D, 2025
23” x 17” x 2 ½”
Plexiglas, latex paint, vinyl, wood mount

You Say You Want it Lighter, 2024

Like many earlier works I have produced, I am interested in the material and cultural intersection of one set of objects to another. In this case, the play between Perriand’s furniture piece which carries evidence within its design a powerful aesthetic of systems-based architecture (predating our current paradigm of flatpac modular housing) of the mid-twentieth century and, my hand-built sequence of archetypal houses.

The eight cement houses are arranged in what could be considered a decorative order in an acknowledgment of both their earlier root within the Bauhaus mantra of combing an individual artistic approach along with mass production. 

More directly, I see these rough built forms as associated with the ineffable power of dreamscapes and dreaming. Where the fleeting archetypical house dream is located here in an attempt to give it a real material scale, weight, density, and serialization. These cement casts evoke a duality between a feeling of innocence and longing for the stability of space; against the perhaps less certain unknown consequences of the future.

Cast cement, Plexiglas and aluminum sculptures placed on a Charlotte Perriand, 1952, designed bookshelf (replica built by cabinetmaker and modernist scholar/curator, Alan Collier)

64” h x 72” w x 14” d

From All the Sightlines You Have Shared, 2024

Aluminum, strapping, plexiglas, flashe, vinyl

medium: 18”h x 14”d x 3”w 
small: 14”h x 9”d x 3”w

Grey light: I see myself, 2024

Plexiglas, latex and acrylic paint, vinyl, aluminum, led lights

12” x 16” x 3” (rectangles)
14” x 20 1/2” x 3” (hexagons)

I want to quantify all the light you have travelled, 2024
Aluminum, Plexiglas, vinyl, latex paint
8’ x 9” x 1 1/2”

Detail 1: I want to quantify all the light you have travelled, 2024
Detail 2: I want to quantify all the light you have travelled, 2024
Detail 3: I want to quantify all the light you have travelled, 2024

I want to synthesize all the spatial realm you have not yet perceived, 2024
Aluminum, Pexiglas, vinyl, latex paint
8’ x 16” x 1 ¼

Model #110: Start your own museum. 2024

Aluminum, Plexiglas, wood, glass, concrete, steel
15 1/2 in x 9 in x 13 in

Neu-build, 2024 (1)
Plexiglas, LEDs / electrical, vinyl, mirror, wood
17.5 in x 22.5”in x 7 in

Neu-build, 2024 (2)
Plexiglas, LEDs / electrical, vinyl, mirror, wood
17.5 in x 22.5”in x 7 in

Small Urban Sunsets,
Skyscraper, 2023 - 2024

Plexiglas, vinyl, LEDs, 4 minute color cycle, controller, electrical, aluminum, photo transparency, wood
57.5 in x 63 in x 11 in

Thought balloons for complicated needs (1) - 2023
Aluminum, wood, glass bead, paint
28 w x 28 h x 16 d inches

Thought balloons for complicated needs (2) - 2023
Aluminum, wood, glass bead, paint
27 w x 28 h x 10 d inches

Thought balloons for complicated needs (3) - 2023
Aluminum, wood, glass bead, paint
24 w x 30 h x 11 d inches

Thought balloons for complicated needs (4) - 2023
Aluminum, wood, glass bead, paint
31 w x 26 h x 14 d inches

Thought balloons for complicated needs (5) - 2023
Aluminum, wood, glass bead, paint
28 w x 25 h x 16 d inches

Super flat double windows, 2023
(1 through 4)

Glass, plexiglas, LED panel, vinyl
54 in x 36 in

Illusion’s Complicated Exchange, 2022

Exhibited:
SHIFT: Ecologies in Fashion, Form + Textile
Curated by Lisa Baldissera
Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver, BC
Sept. 16 - Dec. 10, 2023

SHIFT: Ecologies in Fashion, Form + Textile is a residency and exhibition project, including events, performances and public programs and panels, that will address crucial conceptual and material interrogations of current and future forms of textiles, clothing, and fashion. The exhibition and residency include a variety of mediums from sculpture, painting, photography,
and performative practices. Some reflect on how garments and materials may hold a memory or shape affects, while others tell stories of their makers and their wearers, or the origins of textiles themselves.

SHIFT includes the work of Canadian and international artists China Adams, Jason Dodge, Olaf Holzapfel, Brian Jungen, Annette Kelm, Christiane Lohr, Medrie MacPhee, Liz Magor, Manuel Mathieu, Meret Oppenheim, Robert Rauschenberg, Wolfgang Tillmans, Janet Werner and Robert Youds among others, alongside a residency with Vancouver-based Korean artist Jae Woo Kang.

Illusion’s Complicated Exchange - 2022
75" h x 36" w x 12” d
ball chain, felt, honeycomb aluminum, glass bead, paint, Plexiglas, cardboard, metal connectors

handmade velvet satellite, 2022

Exhibited: Deluge Contemporary, Victoria, BC
September 9 - October 8, 2022
Link to gallery site…

Review in Border Crossings Magazine,
August 2023, by John Luna,
Read the review…

In making art, it’s not that I have nothing to say, rather, I choose to say nothing—preferring the artwork find you, the viewer, held between the spatial complexity/absorption of not knowing.

This recent body of work marks my continuing interest in the built environment of the city. Where our cinematic experience of space and time is shaped by informational matrixes of light, reflection and perpetual movement.

What if the ephemeral aura of contemporary city life could be retrieved, or even suspended momentarily?

Like the earlier futurists, my artworks orchestrate the unstable and conditional reveal of things, objects and pictures, as if dislodged fragments extracted from an urban field. With repurposed charge—these new abstractions exist like individual flashes of synchronic flotsam and jetsam captured upon your light-washed retina.

I have long been drawn to the avant-garde for its brash experimentation and futurist vision. This influence has led me to develop ideas fluidly and free of didactic impulse. My practice is an open ended studio pursuit around the construction of objects, images and the ephemeral voids of light and shadow—necessary in our perception of the material world. Intuition also plays a big part in my process, helping to keep the work fresh aesthetically and intellectually tuned to the ever changing cultural/societal vagaries of time.

Works in exhibition:

Passenger’s Horizon - 2022
5’ w x 16” d
aluminum, glass bead, paint

Heat of the Night - 2022
7’ w x 18” d
aluminum, glass bead, paint

It Begins Here - 2022
5’ w x 14” d
aluminum, glass bead, paint

Readymade Monde - 2022
4’ w x 18” d
aluminum, glass bead, paint

This Way is Clear - 2022
7’ w x 16” d
aluminum, glass bead, paint

Readymade Underground - 2022
9’ h x 6’ w x 5” d
lightboxes, steel, concrete, aluminum, enamel paint, electrical parts

Barefoot Arcade Absorption (two pieces) - 2022
32” h x 22” w x 18” d
aluminum, light box, glass bead, Flashe paint on canvas, electrical parts, carpet

Machineflower, Heaven’s Memory - 2022
25” w x 28” h x 2” d
Honeycomb aluminum, paint, glass bead, wire, photograph

Machineflower, I Have Struggled - 2022
20” x 14” x 1.5” (approx)
honeycomb aluminum, paint, glass bead, wire, photograph

Machineflower, You Remember Me - 2022
20” x 20” x 1.5”
honeycomb aluminum, paint, glass bead, wire, photograph

Your Constant View is My New Underground - 2022
68” h x 42” w x 5” d
paint on canvas, glass bead

Illusion’s Complicated Exchange - 2022
75" h x 36" w x 12” d
ball chain, felt, honeycomb aluminum, glass bead, paint, Plexiglas, cardboard, metal connectors

The Space You Built - 2021

Two views, front and back
74.75” h X 24.50” w X 8” d

aluminum, vinyl, LED lights, Plexiglas, assorted materials

In the making of this artwork I was concerned with creating an abstract tension between the reciprocal top and bottom, backside and front, of the hybrid structure - part architectural vernacular (window) and part advertising display. This perceived tension of illusionistic space and the real has long been an attribute of my practice.

Remembering the Garden / after Cezanne, 2020
Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery

Desks are sites for work – but they are also a place where memory and the imagination take shape. My artworks almost always reinterpret the standard modes of visual expression in art – in this case the desk, lamps, and carpet, could materially be understood as contemporary sculpture. However, I feel the artwork is as much a photograph, and arguably even points to painting history as much as it settles on its actual physical spatial presence. This is achieved through the alluring pattern of changing colours of light gently emitting from the desk lamps as the computer programme searches across photographs of four gardens. The outputted coloured light is the reclaimed colour of flowers captured from within the garden photographs. When I first made this artwork, and witnessed its operation, I immediately thought of Cezanne’s attempt to capture the changing atmosphere of the day’s light in his landscape paintings – thereby questioning the stability of perception itself.

Remembering the Garden / after Cezanne, 2020
10 desk lamps, computer, programme, electrical, florescent tubes, LEDs, Russell Spanner wood table, carpet, aluminum, Plexiglas
6’ x 8’ x 4’

I began these small sign-based works in 2019 and they continued to develop into 2020, the start of the Covid 19 pandemic. I think of them as fictional geographic destinations - places you’ll never know.

During the pandemic lockdown I found myself thinking/longing for future travel destinations. At the same time I was growing hyper aware of how the convenience of excess travel produces such a massive negative environmental pressure on the world.

Works:

1. Podec. The cops have no more curtains in Podec - 2019
14 1/2 x 12x 2 1/2 inches
Plexiglas, aluminum, vinyl, enamel paint

2. Ceohe. Flat tire in Tombstone, Ceohe - 2019
15 x 12 x 2 1/2 inches
Plexiglas, aluminum, vinyl, enamel paint

3. Ebrroe. Across the street in Ebrroe - 2019
15 x 12 x 2 1/2 inches
Plexiglas, aluminum, vinyl, enamel paint

4. Tepina. They’re selling postcards in Tepina - 2019
15 x 12 x 2 1/2 inches
Plexiglas, aluminum, vinyl, enamel paint

5. Sguvi. Museum food services at Sguvi - 2019
10 1/4 x 8 x 2 1/2 inches
Plexiglas aluminum, vinyl, enamel paint

6. Os,e. Cloudless and cool hills of OS,e - 2019
10 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches
Plexiglas, aluminum, vinyl, enamel paint

7. Rehon. The obsolete past of Rehon - 2019
10 1/4 x 8 x 2 1/2 inches
Plexiglas, aluminum, vinyl, enamel paint

Bruno Taut’s window / start your own museum is a series of works ranging in surface and medium and intended as an imagined repository of collected fragments from the urban realm – an archaeology of surface, colour, informational noise, and the remains of human touch.

Bruno Taut’s window / start your own museum, 2019
Aluminum, vinyl, enamel paint, Plexiglas, photograph
75 ½ “ (h) x 24” (w) x 6” (d)
Collection of Surrey Art Gallery
Exhibited Surrey Art Gallery, 2024, Link to exhibition...

Your filmic encore is finally here, Smashed Window, 2019
LED light, Plexiglas, aluminum
24 ½” (w) x 73” (h) x 4” (d)

Your filmic encore is finally here, Falling N, 2019
LED light, Plexiglas, aluminum
24 ½” (w) x 73” (h) x 4” (d)

Broken city speak, 2019
Aluminum, vinyl, enamel paint
84” (w) x 65” (h) x 9” (d)

The Exhibitor Performs - 2018

In the 60s and 70s music was an important and central platform for societal change – particularly the dominance Rock and Roll once held in shaping an alternative culture. This is likely still true of the power of musical influence on inspiring people and their cultural values in general.  However, something that has always surprised me is how the impact of music, both listening and playing, is seldom publicly addressed in the appreciation of a visual artist’s development. I think it is fair to say that most artists listen to music when producing their work. I believe this intense sensory condition may play an important role in the character of what is eventually realized in the studio. I certainly confess this is true of my own artistic production. I routinely go into periods of very select listening patterns (almost like method acting) in order to get into a zone of feeling. In part, The Exhibitor Performs is about recognizing this often unacknowledged gap between music and its influence on studio practice as well as the artist’s own positioning of the self.

The Exhibitor Performs also comes out of a direct interest in observational constructs and their relationship to our psychological understanding of both the pictorial and our collective seeing. In the work, The Exhibitor Performs, I like to imagine an intermittent artist presence behind the atmospheric wall of coloured glass acting out a private moment in space, posting images to be viewed by others, yet playing electrical sounds in an introspective moment. What we perceive instead is an archeology of silence built on memory.

Aluminum, laminated coloured glass, LED programmed strips, electric guitar and amplifier, 3 photographs, wood panel, 3 folding wood stools, assorted electricals

64”w X 70”h X 75” depth

For Everyone A Fountain, E-Catalogue, 2017
Essays by Lisa Baldissera and Diana Freundl
Exhibited: Open Space, Victoria, BC, 2018

Your Best Room is a Glossary, 2017
Digital projection
180 inches X 180 Inches

For Everyone a Fountain, 2017
Collection of the Surrey Art Gallery

Exhibited Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, BC, 2019 and Open Space, Victoria, BC, 2017

Garden in the Machine exhibition at Surrey Art Gallery, September 21 - December 15, 2019 Exhibition website…

I want to be here in this room which holds the hidden and the visible simultaneously. I needed to know what the physical footprint and overall scale would feel like to witness. Over the duration of building the room it got larger in size than I had anticipated. More and more the future and the past pushed inside, needing each other, yet space was going to be short. Soon I found I was only able to look upon the room, my entry was no longer possible. Only the best room is ineffable and fleeting, everyone has theirs. I have lived here, you can too. See pictures. Hear time. Feel surfaces. Light finds shadow. For Everyone a Fountain is the best room you’ll ever know.

Forty task lights and their changing colour compositions programmed to interpret four landscape photographs taken over the seasons of winter, spring, summer, fall.

Honey-comb aluminum panel and galvanized steel sawhorses, electrical cords and power bars, LED lights, computer, speakers, sound, cardboard boxes and assorted electrical.
24’ long X 16’ wide X 12’ high

Your best room is a glossary,  2017
projection

I am alone in it, in front of it,  2017
aluminum frames, laminate glass, LED lights

For Everyone a Fountain, 2018
Collapsed Iteration

Exhibited:
City Cut Flowers
Winchester Gallery, Victoria, BC, 2017
Private collection

City Cut Flowers explores picture/objects as imagined and remembered fragments drawn from our urban world. Small acts of selfhood.

I have been thinking about consciousness in our time. An age old question. How do we as individuals shape it? For example, is a home a home without personal choices evidenced through the  careful spatial choreography of pictures, colours, surfaces, and light? Where do our aesthetic dispositions evolve from? Can the growing digital and AI realms alter our future understanding of the physical world or will they simply reinforce the same elements through a different means?

In these three related painting projects and, two light-based works, each explores the core perceptual conditions of light, shadow, colour, surface, and their communicative relationship to our aesthetic, cultural, and ideological values.

City Cut Flowers, 2017

This work and its changing light explores how an object can be also be an image – in this case communicating through changing coloured light compositions. Aided by computer technology coded to interpret photographic sources the lights replay four seasonal landscape images of Butchard Gardens.

10 lamps, LED bulbs, Hub, Router, computer, power bar, electrical cords, steel case,
3' wide X 6' long
Private Collection

Matisse’s Studio, 2017

Al Neil’s Shack, 2017

Barbara Hepworth’s Chambre, 2017

These three paintings represent my imaginings of each of these iconic artists lived aesthetic condition – the magic and power of their own creative environments and our visual absorption of them.

Enamel paint on canvas, Plexiglas, vinyl   
64.5” X 57.5”

Bruno Taut’s Windows, 1 – 4,  2017

This series represents my fictional imaginings of this important early modernist architect’s windows. His building designs celebrated and explored the relationship between the built form and nature through the manipulation of light and shadow in space.

Enamel paint on Plexiglas, vinyl, and steel,
24” X 40” X 6.5”

Sonia Delaunay’s Wardrobe, 1 & 2,  2017

Conceived to invite multiple arrangements of the painted panels in any order along the shelf. I think of this array of panels as an imagined private collection for the home. I have always admired how Sonia Delaunay bridged the gap between art, fashion, design, and her lived life.

Painted honeycomb aluminum, engineered aluminum shelf
Shelf: 68” L X 8.5” wide, various sized panels

Your Only Living Disaster Is Finally Here - 2015
Collection of Art Gallery of Guelph

Exhibited: Art Gallery of Guelph, Guelph, ON, 2020
Exhibition website…

This work brings together my interests in temporality and materiality: how there are often gaps between experience and our knowing. The painting plays out this incomplete partition of the everyday by inserting a conflict between the illusion of the picture and the technology of the neon signage. Said in another way, this painting becomes a place where the modern mini utopic abstraction meets the jarring physical realm of commercial display.

Enamel and acrylic paint on canvas, neon tubes, transformer, electrical cable, aluminum mounts
96" x 84"
Collection of Art Gallery of Guelph

Your Continuation - 2016
Your Continuation is a machine for looking. It asks us to perceive in the gap between seeing and knowing. Here the picture plane dances in sequences of illumination being fed through the clear Plexiglas while coloured vinyl dots adhered to the surface appear optically to project and recede in a virtual space in front of the construction.  This work arrests our visual desire towards naming, putting us directly into an experiential awareness of ourselves within the room.

Vinyl, aluminum, powder-coated steel, LED lighting, controller, timer, Plexiglas
27”w x 39”h x 10”d

Say Nothing, Twice (Daisies),  2016
Say Nothing, Twice (Daisies) is a machine for looking. It asks us to perceive in the gap between seeing and knowing. Here the picture plane dances in sequences of illumination being fed through the clear Plexiglas while coloured vinyl dots adhered to the surface appear optically to project and recede in a virtual space in front of the construction.  This work arrests our visual desire towards naming, putting us directly into an experiential awareness of ourselves within the room.

Plexiglas, vinyl decals, aluminum, LEDs, programmer

Exhibited: Diaz Contemporary, Toronto, ON, 2015
Link to gallery site…

Say nothing, twice, is a ongoing series of works including both paintings and light constructions that confound perceptual notions of urbanism and nature. In these works, aura, silence, and the space colour holds, are each held at an intersection between our aesthetic and spectatorial understanding of the world. - RY 2015

Underneath Moonmilk Forever I, 2015
Enamel, acrylic, plexiglas, vinyl
72” x 61 x .25"

Underneath Moonmilk Forever II, 2015
Enamel, acrylic, plexiglas, vinyl
72” x 61 x .25"

Underneath Moonmilk Forever III, 2015
Enamel, acrylic, plexiglas, vinyl
72” x 61 x .25"

Underneath Moonmilk Forever IV, 2015
Enamel, acrylic, plexiglas, vinyl
72” x 61 x .25"

Say nothing, twice I, 2015
Acrylic, LEDs, vinyl, 6 minute programmed light cycle
84” x 48” x 10”

Say nothing, twice II, 2015
Acrylic, LEDs, vinyl, 6 minute programmed light cycle
84” x 48” x 10”

If, Flower, 2015
Steel, glass, neon, photo
95” x 16” x 20"

Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, 2014 - 2015
Link to gallery site…

Victoria–based artist Robert Youds takes his cues from the built environment to construct an enigmatic light sculpture. For Everyone a Sunset transforms ordinary materials such as aluminum, salvaged glass and neon lighting to create cinematic plays of light that activate its surroundings.

As viewers move past the aluminum chambers filled with sheets of laminated glass and neon tubing, the individual modules become compositions of light and shadow that are further augmented by changes in natural lighting throughout the day. While the installation is associated with the subject of architecture, it avoids any particular built form. Instead, For Everyone a Sunset triggers an array of pictorial possibilities amidst the surrounding cityscape.

For Everyone a Sunset exists between architecture and design, uniformity and variety, highlighting the intersection of built and natural environments. Shifting tonality as it moves through laminate coloured glass, the light in Youds' work captures our gaze and holds it suspended, suggesting a plenitude of possibilities amidst the regularity of the urban grid. - VAG OffSite curator Diana Freundl

For Everyone a Sunset - 2014-2015
Aluminum, laminate glass, glass, neon, electricals
12’ X 10’ X 35’

Link to the catalogue of the exhibition Rewilding Modernity, 2013 - 2014
Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, SK

Curated by Lisa Baldissera

Rewilding Modernity was presented in the fall of 2013 at the Mendel Art Gallery. Among the artists represented in the exhibition are: Polly Apfelbaum, Bob Boyer, Robert Christie, Wally Dion, Mina Forsyth, Roy Kiyooka, Kenneth Lochhead, Jules Olitski, William Perehudoff, Jennifer Steinkamp, and Robert Youds.

Rewilding modernity or rustic modern – Your constant waterfall. I was interested in the term ‘Waterfall illusion” in visual psychology, where we optically compensate for motion tracking within our brain. The individual pieces spin when gently touched – which in turn makes the whole room appear to spin, and where the art works optically come apart. The works included in Your constant waterfall confound our expectation of objects and pictures – the art needs its context and indeed its activation. - RY 2013

Works in exhibition:

dirty words, salt air breath and all your midnight changes - 2013
door panels, acrylic paint, vinyl
12’ X 2’ X 7’

Urban tribe - 2011
Pine wood slabs, LED lights and programmer
2' x 6' x 15" approx
Collection of the Remai Modern Gallery, Sask, SK

Your constant waterfall, Galiano - 2012
Acrylic on canvas on aluminum, steel components
52" diameter

Your constant waterfall, Bowen - 2012
Acrylic on canvas on aluminum, steel components
52" diameter

Your constant waterfall, Denman - 2012
Acrylic on canvas on aluminum, steel components
52" diameter

View video of Urban Tribe, Rewilding Modernity

Exhibited: Diaz Contemporary, Toronto, ON, 2013
Link to gallery site…

Read the Canadian Art review, "Carpenter Gothic" by Gary Michael Dault, September 2013

Collection: TD Centre’s Art Collection…

Time is long. Time is short. Things begin. Things recede. Some things repeat, over and over again. And as nearness becomes more difficult to perceive and everything once distant is brought closer through technologies – the self may be the only remaining site by which to measure ourselves.

My artworks represent a sense of multiple regularities (time) and change (history) as a way of engaging the percipient in a durational moment of self-awareness. These new abstract paintings assert their physical presentness and their own pictorial distance simultaneously - as if to ask, where is now?

When I mark the canvas with a piece of 2 x 4 board – it’s a direct and real moment, nothing planned, just the record anticipated. This process is like the beginning of times earliest pictures, hand print as stencil on cave wall. Once I begin to introduce colour decisions into the paintings the directness of the first marks become somewhat softened by the added effects of pictorialism and atmosphere. Both object and image, these inadvertent contemporary compositions refuse to settle, while their repeated vernacular of the built form remains constant.

I think of these artworks as pictorial illusions encoded with an urban patina of longing for a self once imagined and enabled within nature. They are also synthetically versicoloured abstractions that task us with their immediate and perceptual imbeddedness. - RY 2012

Works in exhibition:

Erickson's Smith house - 2012
Acrylic on canvas
64" x 57"

Emily Carr's retreat - 2012
Acrylic on canvas
64" x 57"

Lauren Harris' shelter - 2012
Acrylic on canvas
64" x 57"

Malcolm Lowry's shack - 2012
Acrylic on canvas
64" x 57"

Tom's cabin - 2012
Acrylic on canvas
64" x 57"

Pollock's studio - 2012
Acrylic on canvas
64" x 57"

Your constant waterfall, Denman - 2012
Acrylic on canvas on aluminum, steel components
52" diameter

Your constant waterfall, Galiano - 2012
Acrylic on canvas on aluminum, steel components
52" diameter

Your constant waterfall, Bowen - 2012
Acrylic on canvas on aluminum, steel components
52" diameter

Your constant waterfall, Hornby - 2012
Acrylic on canvas on aluminum, steel components
52" diameter

Our Aurora Borealis and Everything Else - 2014
diptych, acrylic and enamel on 2 canvases
325 x 144 cm
Exhibited in Xi'an and Beijing China as part of the exhibition, The Transformation of Canadian Landscape Art, Inside and Outside of Being, 2014

Varley’s spectatorial raft - 2012
Enamel and acrylic on canvas
65" x 58" each panel

Exhibited: Deluge Contemporary, Victoria, BC
Link to gallery site…


"Youds’ structures and textures synthesizing varied time signatures (rust, warp, gloss, sheen, haze or flicker) confer an ethics of time and matter, suggesting the way each might rightly be used beyond merely being used up. That suggestion continues through to the final work in the exhibition. The angled fluorescent tubing brokered by sheets of grey and yellow glass in the low, horizontal span of Wood is resilient in earthquakes rests on an aromatic cedar beam, a battery to wood’s soft insulation. The glow of the tubes mimics sunlight passing through venetian blinds in the gallery’s adjacent south-facing windows. Time, merged and elided, resolves on the wall. You feel steadied by the likes of Youds’ light, and by its longer-than-expected stay, just as you might feel about a raking slant glanced upon waking." - Robert Youds: Light Industry, by John Luna, Canadian Art, March 29, 2012, (Room Upgrade for Pacific Northwest Afternoon, Deluge Contemporary, Victoria, BC)
Complete Canadian Art Article…


Works in exhibition:

Room Upgrade for Pacific Northwest Afternoon - 2012
cedar shingles, fluorescent lamps, aluminum
6’ X 6’ X 2’
Collection of National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON

turn on your electric - 2011
steel, glass laminate, plywood, surfboard
5’ X 10’ X 2’
Collection of Vancouver Art Gallery

Wood is Resilient in Earthquakes - 2012
cedar, fluorescent lamps, aluminum, glass laminate
8’ X 8”
Collection of the Remai Modern, Saskatoon, SK

Erickson's Cabin - 2012
Lexan box, assorted fluorescent lamps, wood veneer
125.7 x 92.7 x 26 cm
Collection of the Art Gallery of Hamilton

Usonian Cave - 2012

Installed at RBC Centre, 155 Wellington St W, Toronto, ON, 2011

Seeing you seeing: colour wheel, utilizes the atmospheric condition of colour, light, and shadow to define space and to demarcate our incomplete partition of the everyday. As the ambient light of day rises and falls through the vestibule windows lighting the sculpture, so do the conditions by which we experience it change. We catch ourselves in this orchestration. The coloured glass of the artwork becomes both a cinematic collector and distributor as it captures reflected images moving across its surface and throws saturated patches of spectral light waves here and there into the architectural arena.

Aluminum, Plexiglas, with steel base
6' X 4'

Exhibited at Winchester Modern, Victoria, BC

Object/image paintings – taking their cues from cultural things as varied as magazines, urban signage, and architectural vernacular such as windows and passages.

Works in exhibition:

Robin's egg blue dazzle electric - 2011
Aluminum panel, enamel paint
24" x 36" x 2.5"

Robin's egg blue dazzle extreme - 2011
Aluminum panel, enamel paint
24" x 36" x 2.5"

View for Aldo Rossi nightlight - 2011
Aluminum panel, enamel paint
24" x 36" x 2.5"

View for Louis Kahn whitelight - 2011
Aluminum panel, enamel paint
24" x 36" x 2.5"

Foldout/our spectrum - 2011
Aluminum panel, enamel paint
24" x 36" x 2.5"

Foldout/push day - 2011
Aluminum panel, enamel paint
24" x 36" x 2.5"

Foldout/rest - 2011
Aluminum panel, enamel paint
24" x 36" x 2.5"

Foldout/sleep - 2011
Aluminum panel, enamel paint
24" x 36" x 2.5"

Foldout/your RGB - 2011
Aluminum panel, enamel paint
24" x 36" x 2.5"

Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery
Exhibited: Out of Sight, New Acquisitions, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2014. Link to gallery site...

The title for this work, and later the show, is inspired by a Van Morrison lyric from the song “Caravan”, where he belts out the words, “Turn it up, turn it up, little bit higher radio. Turn it up, turn it up, so you know, radio…La, la, la, la, la, la, la…La, la, la, la, la, la, la.” I like the instructive insistence in his voice as he shouts this line out into the world. I imagine seeing the sound waves literally tracing outwards from his lips. I think of my work doing the same, that the object/material presence of the work is the sonic epicenter for the extraneous projection of an emotive ideal. Turn on Your Electric is the coloured glass, steel and wood manifestation of this same ambition. In this way it takes some of its cues by way of a small reversal on earlier modern glass architecture structures where nature is externally framed by the built structure – think Mies Van de Rohe’s Farnsworth House, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, le Corbusier’s Heidi Weber Museum. In Turn on Your Electric the work is both an aesthetic collector for image reflection and spectral light, but also a beacon outwards to a changing yet still idealized nature. - RY, 2011

Work in exhibition:

turn on your electric, arcade - 2011
Steel, glass, surfboard, fluorescent lighting, plywood base
5' x 10' x 2' approx

Urban tribe - 2011
Pine wood slabs, LED lights and programmer
2' x 6' x 15" approx

Robin's egg blue dazzle electric - 2011
Aluminum panel, enamel paint
24" x 36" x 2.5"

Robin's egg blue dazzle extreme - 2011
Aluminum panel, enamel paint
24" x 36" x 2.5"

View for Aldo Rossi nightlight - 2011
Aluminum panel, enamel paint
24" x 36" x 2.5"

View for Louis Kahn whitelight - 2011
Aluminum panel, enamel paint
24" x 36" x 2.5"

“Youds’ insistence on theory as experience is refreshing. Equally so is his resulting desire to keep his work visually urgent and emotionally insistent – fueled, but not scuttled by theoretical ideas. Youds’ conviction that the viewer’s subjectivity should not be complicated – that is encumbered, by art theory is everywhere in evidence in this exuberant exhibition...The rest of the show is equally joyfully intense."  – Gary Michael Dault, Globe and Mail, May 23, 2009 (Jesus Green Tofino Sunset, Diaz Contemporary, Toronto, ON) Read article...

What if every life had only five episodic markers and everything else occurred in relational links to these events? And what if we called these markers X,Y,Z,A,B. It turns out that X,Y,Z,A,B can be digitally captured and replayed in a continuous repeating six minute cycle. A dull alternating Orange-Rose light of morning followed the darkest Phalo-Blue ever experienced as night. Mid-day is always Turquoise until it changes to afternoon Purple followed by an evening Green.

X: Sleeping took place in two minutes, but it was all you needed.
Y: Work required two minutes, but seemed twice as long.
Z: Pleasure is more difficult to measure because of occurring in nano time, but it came with such irregular synaptic frequency it most always totaled thirty seconds.
A: Gaps here and there where episodes of Mash run non-stop, Curb Your Enthusiasm is much harder to locate, Sonic Youth play another art opening, fifteen seconds.
B: Experiences of icebergs the size of your cat, arriving home to dinner, not naming, describing something you had never seen before, faking interest, shaking hands, sounds not music, air, water, love, death… the time separating you from everything else, one minute and fifteen seconds.  - RY, 2009

Works in exhibition:

For Everyone a Window - 2009
aluminum I beam, Lexan, LEDs and Controller, aluminum panels, digital sign-boards
40" x 60" x 6.5"
Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Jesus Green Tofino Sunset - 2009
foam, LEDs, programmer/controller
6’ X 2’ X 4’

Octopus, 2009 (on and off)
Lexan, electrical parts, assorted bulbs
24 in diameter

look out your window/TIME MUST HAVE A STOP - 2009
aluminum, enamel paint, clear coat, plexiglas, + 2 spun aluminum stools and aluminum chain
variable dimensions

Another way to Get There - 2009
aluminum, enamel paint, clear coat, plexiglas, + 1 spun aluminum stools and aluminum chain
variable dimensions

Last Time We Stayed - 2009

Day for Night Recall - 2009

Verner Panton's Very Best Day - 2009

LOLA Festival, London, ON, 2009

I was asked to consider making an artwork as a direct response to a outdoor site somewhere in the downtown sector of London, Ontario. Consequently, I proposed to change all the white tungsten lamps in the existing lamp posts which follow the central footpath through Victoria Park. I replaced the white light with the seven colours of our visual spectrum. This work represented yet another opportunity for me to develop an art project that is fully integrated within its context and one that acknowledged the tension between our aesthetic and spectatorial experience of the world. - RY, 2009

In these works I wanted there to be a simple and yet necessary connection between the materials – like what happens in some forms of architecture. The steel frame both supports and compliments the illusory window – which is comprised of two sheets of glass with a colour transparency sandwiched between. The transparencies are photographs of existing artworks re-purposed or perhaps re-activated. The photo transparencies allow light to pass through them casting a second image and an array of colour onto the gallery wall. The perceptual experience embedded in these pieces is what I call the image/object flux – something which runs through all my work.

Works:

All untitled - 2008
Powder-coated steel, glass, photo transparency

Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 2007
Curated by Lisa Baldissera

Read the Canadian Art review, "With Light: Robert Youds" by Barry Schwabsky, Fall 2007

Excerpt from essay by Saul Ostrow, "Robert Youds: The Real as Subjected as Form"...

It was during the 1950s and 60s that artists concerned with the confluence of art, science, and technology momentarily broke through into the mainstream under such rubrics as “experiments in art and technology,” “light art,” and “cyber art.” Employing forms like programmable light boxes, light shows, robotic sculptures, interactive sound and light installations and environments, and abstract films, artists employing new media and technologies creatively exploited real time and space to explore phenomenal, perceptual, and material concerns. In the face of pop art, minimalism, and the various schools of abstract painting that dominated the critical scene at that time, these works—which were
dismissed as gimmicky or merely interesting experiments that would go nowhere — sank out of sight.

The most enduring heritage from this period seems to be the disco dance floors of the 70s, psychedelic light shows, and the blinking lights used to represent advanced technologies in sci-fi movies. It was this exclusion, or subordination, of modernism’s exploration of sensuous experience that, in part, made the work of such 60s artists as Dan Flavin, Doug Wheeler, and James Turrell, or the recent work of Jennifer Steinkampf, Leo Villareal, and Youds, appear to have no other precedent than abstract painting. Given this problematic history, the question is how are we to understand the pronounced materiality of the light works Youds makes today.

Excerpt from catalogue interview, "Karin Davie in Conversation with Robert Youds"...

KD: I love how you playfully commit to putting things together that might resemble a neon store sign, street lights, industrial packaging, gadgets, modernist furniture and make a totally new and impure hybrid abstract form. I remember a piece you did in 1999, Goodbye. It looks like some kind of modernist / futuristic creature, packaged and ready to be shipped out to another destination.

RY: Yes, Goodbye was a work I made in the late 90s, part of a larger series of works that had certain formal characteristics in common. They were intended just as you describe — to be hybrid adaptations, a sort of constructivism meets our contemporary lifestyle. I felt they could just as easily have been installed like furniture in the home, or perhaps shopping mall signage, rather than limited to the gallery. I was interested in the work implying itself back into the world of things. Artificial light has a transfixing quality that easily catches our gaze. It is part of our everyday world — it lights our homes, streets, storefronts, and work places. Those works
you are talking about were meant as lights to light our spaces by.

Works in exhibition:

Late One Morning - 2005
Plexiglas, aluminum, fluorescent lights, assorted objects
122 x 152 x 25 cm

Phantasm or Lo and Behold - 2005
Plexiglas, aluminum, fluorescent lights, assorted objects
122 x 152 x 25 cm

Friday - 2006
Lexan, fluorescent lights, assorted objects
91 x 124 x 25 cm
Collection of the Art Gallery of Hamilton

Saturday - 2006
Lexan, fluorescent lights, assorted objects
91 x 124 x 25 cm

Sunday - 2006
Lexan, fluorescent lights, assorted objects
91 x 124 x 25 cm
Collection of the Art Gallery of Hamilton

I feel the air of another planet - 2004
Plexiglas, aluminum, neon light, polycarbonate
124 x 163 x 30 cm
Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON

Plato’s Cave - 2005
Plexiglas, aluminum, LED colour-changing tubes, theater lamp,
electronic controls, electric fans, foil
122 x 152 x 15 cm
Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON

airguitar/teeth - 2007
various materials / various sizes

Advertisement for Absorption (blue) - 2005
cast plastic, fluorescent light
61 cm sphere

skymud - 2005
cast plastic, fluorescent light
61 cm sphere

friendlyburn - 2005
cast plastic, fluorescent light
61 cm sphere

quoting Blake/one cloud festival - 2007
various materials, intermittent duration (30 seconds on, 2 minutes off)

Three Hundred Times a Day - 2001
Plexiglas, aluminum, closed-circuit TV, vinyl, lights
152 x 122 x 25 cm
Collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

Home Is Office - 2001
Plexiglas, steel, aluminum, vinyl, glass, light
152 x 122 x 91 cm
Collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

Thank You - 1999
Plexiglas, steel, aluminum, plastic, fabric, light
157 x 38 x 20 cm
Collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

Booster - 1998
Plexiglas, steel, aluminum, light
135 x 56 x 25 cm
Collection of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery

Visiteur - 1998
Plexiglas, aluminum, light
183 x 66 x 15 cm
Collection of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery

Our Raum Licht, 2006

Exhibited:
Diaz Contemporary, Toronto, 2006
Link to gallery site…

Plato's Cave - 2005
Plexiglass, aluminum, LED's & theatre light
66" x 46" x 8" and 24" x 120" x 18"

Friday - 2006
Lexan, fluorescent lights & assorted objects
36" x 49" x 10"

Saturday - 2006
Lexan, fluorescent lights & assorted objects
36" x 49" x 10"

Sunday - 2000
Lexan, fluorescent lights & assorted objects
36" x 49" x 10"

Installation view at Diaz Contemporary, 2006

Late One Morning - 2006
Lexan, fluorescent lights & assorted objects
36" x 49" x 10"

Friendly Burn - 2005
Cast plastic & flourescent lights
24" diameter

Skymud - 2005
Cast plastic & flourescent light
24" diameter

Advertisement for Absorption (Blue) - 2005
Cast plastic & flourescent lights
24" diameter

Advertisement for Absorption (Green) - 2005
Cast plastic & flourescent lights
24" diameter

So Long, 2006
Oak barrel, light projector, Plexiglas, paint

Storagewall, 2002
36 x 84 x 24, aluminum, enamel paint, Plexiglas

I feel the air of another planet - 2004
Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON

Exhibited: Beautiful Beautiful Artificial Field
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 2007

Exhibited: The Shape of Colour: Excursions in Colour Field Art , 1950-2005
Art Gallery of Ontario, 2005
Link to gallery site..
Essay by Ben Portis in the exhibition catalogue

”The exhibition reconsiders the 1960s chapter of colour field art not through Clement Greenberg’s restrictive formalist lens, but rather opens up the impulse to pure colour and form to comprise a half-century of painting, sculpture and installation work. The exhibition posits Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still as essential precursors, includes the seminal colour field artists Helen Frankenthaler Morris Louis and Jack Bush, expands definitions to encompass the work of Dan Flavin, and features numerous contemporary artists such as Monique Prieto and Polly Apfelbaum, who have refracted the legacy of colour field into our contemporary moment. Other artists whose work explores the possibilities through which to understand this fertile, but often overlooked movement include Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, John McCracken, Guido Molinari, Micheal Snow and Robert Youds.”

Plexiglas, aluminum, neon lights, polycarbonate, steel
124 x 163 x 30 cm

Chronochromie - 2002

Sable Castelli Gallery, Toronto, 2003
Acrylic paint on canvas
57” X 64”

Light-based structures, 2003 - 1999

Red Stage - 2002
Plexiglas, aluminum, rubber
121 x 228 x 60 cm
Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario

Chronochromie 2 - 2003
Aluminum, plexiglass & projected light
48" x 60" x 6"

When we feel better - 2002
Plexiglas, aluminum, flour, paint
121 x 152 x 25 cm

Bookshelves both sides to ceiling - 2001
aluminum, glass, vinyl, light
121 x 152 cm

Three skylights pierce the roof - 2001
aluminum, glass, vinyl, light
121 x 152 cm
Collection of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery

Apartment - 2001
aluminum, plexglas, fluorescent light, vinyl, plastic
84” X 36”

Apartment - 2001 (detail)
aluminum, plexglas, fluorescent light, vinyl, plastic
84” X 36”

Condo - 2001
aluminum, wire, wood
213 x 91 cm

Room - 1999
aluminum, wire, wood mug, steel pole
18’ X 3’

Right Here - 1999
steel, plexiglas, aluminum, black & white photo
52” X 27” X 7”

Hold Please - 1999
steel, plexiglas, aluminum, black & white photo
56’ X 31” X 7”

Goodbye - 1999
Plexiglas, aluminum, vinyl, light
190 x 71 x 17 cm
Collection of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery

Dream Better - 1998
oil on canvas

The Morning Light was Better Then, Time Machine for Remembering - 1998
Toronto Sculpture Park model

The Musician - 2005
Lexan, electric lights


 

Exhibition at Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1999
Curated by Louis Grachos and Bruce Ferguson
Catalogue essays by David Moos and David Pagel
Artists: Polly Apfelbaum, David Batchelor, Martha Benzing, Linda Besemer, Ingrid Calame, Paul Campbell, Helmut Dorner, Mark Francis, Barbara Gallucci, Jason Martin, Kirk McCarthy, John McCracken, Olivier Mosset, Cornelia Parker, Florence Pierce, Carter Potter, David Reed, Paul Sarkisian, Linda Stark, Jennifer Steinkamp, John Torreano, Robert Youds

In this exhibition a progression within abstract art becomes apparent. Working both toward and away from an earlier formalist tradition, the artists in this exhibition balance a conventional interest in materiality and form with their use of atypical mediums and techniques-at times creating work that in contrast to a discrete object, becomes dependent on the spaces surrounding it. Here, the possibilities of abstract art are extended: the importance of the eye in the art experience is superseded by a more visceral encounter with materials. The work performs a seduction that reminds us of the potential of color, form, space and texture.

survivant - 1999
painted steel, aluminum, Plexiglass, and fluorescent light
92.5 x 4 x 33 inches

visiteur - 1999
painted steel, aluminum, Plexiglass, and fluorescent light
72 x 10 x 31 inches

he - 1998
rubber latex on nylon, aluminum
89.5 x 3 x 3 inches

him - 1998
rubber latex on nylon, aluminum
89.5 x 3 x 3 inches

me - 1998
rubber latex on nylon, aluminum
89.5 x 3 x 3 inches

she - 1998
rubber latex on nylon, aluminum
89.5 x 3 x 3 inches

you - 1998
rubber latex on nylon, aluminum
89.5 x 3 x 3 inches

stay quiet / blue diagonal - 1998
rubber latex on nylon, plexiglas

twistfoldlayerflake, 1999

Exhibited:
twistfoldlayerflake Link to gallery site…
Oliver Art Center
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Oakland, CA
Curated by Larry Rinder

The works in this exhibition take us to the extremes of formal and expressive possibilities. Six West Coast artists are featured: Geoffrey Allen, Linda Besemer, Ingrid Calame, Sally Elesby, Seth Kaufman and Robert Youds. The exhibition includes recent works by these artists, as well as rare early works by Yves Klein, Richard Tuttle and Lynda Benglis, artists whose work helped to lay the foundation for explorations into the outer limits of material, medium, and dimensionality.

These works are part of a series of twelve.

stay quiet / blue diagonal - 1998
rubber latex on nylon, Plexiglas
89.5 x 3 x 3 inches

him, her - 1998
rubber latex on nylon, aluminum
89.5 x 3 x 3 inches

he - 1998
rubber latex on nylon, aluminum
89.5 x 3 x 3 inches

me - 1998
rubber latex on nylon, aluminum
89.5 x 3 x 3 inches

He/She, 1997
Review of exhibition:
Elevator, at Post Gallery, LA
Los Angeles Times, June, 1997
By David Pagel

Captivating: You’ve heard of elevator music. But have you ever heard of elevator art?
A pair of long, vertical works by British Columbia – based artist Robert Youds get quite a bit of of mileage out of this seemingly silly idea. Installed above one another in the elevator shaft at Post Gallery, these playful stripe paintings replace the mind-numbing blandness for which elevator music is known with a jolt of raw energy.
Made of afghans that have been cut into thin strips and dipped in enamel paint, each piece consists of two 7-foot-long sections of fabric whose gnarled, irregular edges gently entwine. In one, a blue strip hangs next to a purple one; in the other, a bright yellow swathe casually wraps around an acid green one.
Part of the pleasure of Youds’ art is because of its setting. The unrefined elevator shaft, fully visible from the unenclosed freight elevator, accentuates the scrappy, in-the-street feel of his fugitive paintings.
One advantage of exhibiting in an elevator shaft is that you have a captive audience. The biggest disadvantage is that your pieces have less than a minute to do their work.
Youds’ clever abstractions make the best of this setup. By providing a fleeting interlude to an everyday activity, these stripped-bare-stripe paintings compel viewers to pay close attention as art passes by faster than usual.

 - Post Gallery, 1904 E. 7th Place, LA

He/She - 1997
rubber latex on nylon, aluminum, brushed steel mounts
89.5 x 3 x 3 inches

Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery

Exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 1996
Topographies, Aspects of Recent B.C. Art
Grant Arnold, curator

Exhibited at the Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, ON, 1999
Spilled Edge, Soft Corners,
Barbara Fischer, curator

Here I Am, Say Nothing - 1995
velvet, foam cushion, rope, paint
62 x 62 x 4 in
Collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

Here I Am, Forget Everything -1995
velvet, foam cushion, rope, paint
62 x 62 x 4 in
Collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

Blue Rise - 1995
velvet, foam cushion, rope, paint
62 x 62 x 4 in

Here I Am, The Only Living Survivor - 1995
velvet, foam cushion, rope, paint
62 x 62 x 4 in

Here I Am, My Enemies Love Me - 1995
velvet, foam cushion, rope, paint
62 x 62 x 4 in

Here I Am, More Or Less - 1995
velvet, foam cushion, rope, paint
62 x 62 x 4 in
Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery

Scissel, 1993 - 1994

Exhibited:
Sable-Castelli Gallery, Toronto, ON, 1994

Exhibited:
Forse Che Si, Forse Che No
(Maybe Yes, Maybe No)
Greg Bellerby, Curator
Catalogue text: Willard Holmes, 1994
-Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 1994
-Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, AB, 1994
-The Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 1995

Exhibition photographs: Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 1995

Untitled, Scissel (there are two versions of the Scissel paintings)
1) acrylic on linen; 62” X 64”
2) wax & oil on linen with maple frame
20” X 24”

Grid, 1990 - 1992

Exhibited:
Sable-Castelli Gallery, Toronto, ON, 1992

Exhibited:
Forse Che Si, Forse Che No
(Maybe Yes, Maybe No)
Greg Bellerby, Curator
Catalogue text: Willard Holmes, 1994
- Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 1994
- Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, AB, 1994
- The Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 1995

Exhibition photographs: Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 1995

Untitled, Grid (ten paintings in the series)
62” X 62”
acrylic and varathane on canvas

Signing, 1989 - 1990

Exhibited:
Sable-Castelli Gallery, Toronto, ON, 1990

Exhibited:
Forse Che Si, Forse Che No
(Maybe Yes, Maybe No)
Greg Bellerby, Curator
Catalogue text: Willard Holmes, 1994
- Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 1994
- Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, AB, 1994
- The Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 1995

“I began making abstract paintings while in university in the late 70s [...] I remember being completely transfixed by the immediacy of the picture plane and the power of colour — when these elements are reduced, there is nothing that works faster on the eyes.”

Untitled, Signing (ten paintings in the series)
acrylic and oil on canvas
68 ins x 57 ins

Family Tree, 1989
acrylic and oil on canvas
57 ins x 64 ins; 144.8 cms x 162.6 cms

Exhibition photographs: Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 1995

Myopia, 1988 - 1989
Exhibited:
Sable-Castelli Gallery, Toronto, ON, 1989

Exhibited:
Forse Che Si, Forse Che No
(Maybe Yes, Maybe No)
Greg Bellerby, Curator
Catalogue text: Willard Holmes, 1994
- Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 1994
- Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, AB, 1994
- The Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 1995

Exhibition photographs: Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 1995

Untitled, Myopia (ten paintings in the series)
acrylic on canvas
68” X 57”

Exhibited:
Sable-Castelli Gallery, Toronto, ON, 1987

Exhibited:
Forse Che Si, Forse Che No
(Maybe Yes, Maybe No)
Greg Bellerby, Curator
Catalogue text: Willard Holmes, 1994
- Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 1994
- Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, AB, 1994
- The Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 1995

In these early works I was interested in the idea of achieving layers of suggested meaning within the paintings composition. This strategy was combined with an aggressive relationship to the viewer’s presence in front of the picture. I was conscious of setting up a conflict for the viewer between seeing and perceiving. While these paintings made an occasional nod to earlier developments in abstraction, they were also contemporary markers, uneasy referents to things within the consumer world. I intended my hybrid abstract paintings which also involved the depiction of light, as cycloptic - metaphorically the paintings looked back at the viewer. Thereby shifting the expected artistic norm to achieve topicality through subject matter carried within the works own registry, back onto the responsibility of the beholder.

Exhibition photographs: Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 1995

Twenty works in the series:
Untitled, Charger, 1987
acrylic on canvas
62” X 62”

Exhibited:
Mercer Union, Toronto, ON, 1987
Link to Mercer Union Gallery website…

Reviewed by Richard Rhodes,
C Magazine #13, 1987

Also exhibited:
Forse Che Si, Forse Che No
(Maybe Yes, Maybe No)
Greg Bellerby, Curator
Catalogue text: Willard Holmes, 1994
- Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 1994
- Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, AB, 1994
- The Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 1995

Exhibition photographs: Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 1995

Eight works in this series:
Untitled, More, 1986
Acrylic on canvas
62” X 62”
Private collections

Exhibited: Grunwald Gallery, Toronto, ON, 1985
Collection: Canada Council Art Bank

Reviewed by Donna Lypchuk, C Magazine, 1986

Exhibited at Glendon Gallery, Toronto, ON, 1983
Encaustic, wood

“Youds’ paintings break out of the repetition of social signs and present an image of the free productivity of visuality. The swirling colors explode their social context. A brightly lit eruption of paint, these paintings demonstrate that images are merely artefactual and we can recreate and redirect the image-making process which makes our paper lifestyle…These paintings take our eyes and push them to the limit, infinitely.” – George Free, Vanguard Magazine, 1983 (Paper Lifestyle, Glendon Gallery, Toronto, 1983)

Wall / Floor Works, 1979 - 1980

Shelf for Newman, 1980
Wax, cardboard, wood, pigment
8’ X 4’

Wall, floor, number 1, 1979
Fibreglass, paint on canvas, wood, green artificial turf
18” X 14”

Wall, floor, number 2, 1979
Fibreglass, paint on canvas, wood
18” X 16’

Wall, floor, number 3, 1979
Paint on canvas, wood, blue artificial turf
18” X 14’

Ambulance, 1979
Aluminum, enamel paint, wood frame
8’ X 10’ X 3”

Printed Matter, 1980
Aluminum, enamel paint, wood frame
8’ X 10’ X 3”

You’re So Swiss Knife, 1980
Aluminum, enamel paint, wood frame
8” X 10’ X 3”

We’ll be the Passenger, 1979
Aluminum, enamel paint, wood frame
8’ X 10’ X 3”

Willful Damage, 1979
Exhibited: Vancouver Art Gallery, Affinities - Ten Painters of this Region, 1979
acrylic on canvas
274 X 548 inches

Between Streets, 1978
Collection of the Canada Council for the Arts, Art Bank
acrylic and pastel on canvas
172 cm x 273.5 cm

Ain’t No Justice, 1978
Exhibited: A Change in the Weather, Signal Hill Gallery, Victoria, BC
Collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
acrylic on canvas
208.3 x 170.5 cm

Shift, 1978
Exhibited: A Change in the Weather, Signal Hill Gallery, Victoria, BC
Private Collection
acrylic on canvas
48” x 72” inches