Collecting topographic data like a diligent surveyor, JOSEPH E. YOAKUM operates on ordinary paper with ballpoint pens, colored pencils, pastels, or watercolors. His illustrated surveys delve deep into personal history, collective unconscious, and beyond. Part anatomical charts and part geological structures, the vernacular landscapes shown for the first time in France shape a notebook of intimate remembrances, open on a common horizon. Whether dreamed or real, the archaeogeographic drawings capture fragments of visited landscapes and reveal the perpetual movement of the artist's inner turmoil as much the scope of his shimmering travels.
Carried by remembrance and consisting of passages, undulations, folds, and borders, they are the reflections of a poetic and animist perception of the natural world, where the hemmed mountains look like brains, the soft rivers are blood flows, and the skies calm seas; where perspectives are radically flattened and the brightly colored patterns are tightly shaped.