Robert Yoder made this show because he has
complaints. He is not impressed with what he sees. He feels
disconnected from the Seattle scene and dissatisfied with art
generally. The last great show he can name is Gustave Courbet at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not fair—Courbet is pretty much art’s
ultimate OG. But point taken: Yoder’s in a critical mood and doesn’t
want to stagnate here.
So he thought up Send Me an Angel, a circulatory system of an
event at Howard House. It’s a residency where anybody can drop in and
talk to him Thursdays to Saturdays, a series of workshops where he
teaches collaging, an exhibition of a few of his finished and
in-progress collages and paintings, and an “audience” of faces watching
him from the wall behind his worktable: 56 portraits by other artists
from his own collection or that he borrowed for the occasion.
The decision to create a peanut gallery turns out to be the best
part of the show. It’s a gift of exposure to other artists—I’d
never before seen James Cicatko’s breathtaking portraits on small
pieces of paper or anything like these raw and vivid conglomerations
from recent art-school grad Ben Waterman—and it’s also like an
admission of Yoder’s guilty feelings about his dismay at other art. By
curating a storm of great and small paintings and photographs by other
people, Yoder has intentionally diverted attention away from his own
jewel-toned, modestly sized collages perched on the edges of
otherwise-blank white papers on the facing wall.
While the connections are anything but direct—Yoder is an
abstractionist, after all—you can come away from all of
this material with an idea of what Yoder truly loves, and even what he
wants his own work to strive for. As obvious as this may sound, it
merits attention: His aesthetic is overridingly visual. He is concerned
with the arrangement of lines, colors, and masses, the illusion of
depth (or lack thereof), and properties like placement and order. These
sound dry but aren’t necessarily. Yoder does not want to race toward
the translation of a visual image into understandability; he wants to
delay it as long as possible, ideally forever.
This is what he is after in new paintings (he’s returning to
painting after 25 years away, and even he is dissatisfied with the
early, soggy returns) and a series of collages that move away from his
former interest in architecture and into sidelong depictions of the
body—usually, the penis. These new penises are barbed, or split,
or green, or rigged up on a red pedestal.
Yoder is well-established in Seattle, but his collages are for me
hit-or-miss, albeit more hit than miss. They are made of the cold,
irresistible pages of glossy magazines and thick tape in specific
colors that stick in the brain (a deadpan pink comes to mind). When he
hits, the accomplishment is simple: I just do not want to stop looking,
considering the layers, wondering what these things were and what they
are now—reckoning with what’s right in front of me because,
thankfully, I have the eyes to see it. 
