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Inspired by ancient Fayum mummy images at the Louvre while still an art student in Paris, Y. Z. Kami has spent much of his career creating anonymous portraits. The works he saw in the museum date to somewhere during the period when Egypt was part of the Roman Empire. The Fayum paintings, depicting the deceased and woven into the top layer of the bandages used for mummification, are widely recognized for their large eyes and sense of individuality. Kami enjoys the ambiguity that anonymity gives to his ancient exemplars and applies it to his own work.

Over the course of his career, the ideas Kami has discussed have varied in specifics, but have remained thematically consistent: spirituality, death, and the infinite. At the time he began exhibiting the series for which he created the Hood’s untitled painting, the AIDS epidemic continued to rage. Interpretation of these works has centered on the agony of losing a generation of young men. The paintings do not (necessarily) document actual AIDS patients, but rather stand in for the idea of loss that can be engendered in images. Kami paints the man in a soft style, short on detail and long on evocation.Often the material of an object can help steer the viewer in meaningful directions that go beyond the ostensible subject of the work. Throughout the last century artists paid increasing attention to the inherent qualities of their materials, and we witnessed the rise of paintings that were—at least in part—about paint, and sculptures that addressed the clay, plaster, stone, or wood from which they were made. Materials can also amplify meaning when they carry their own associations, as with found art and collage, instances where the individual parts each contribute something special to the whole composition.

Y. Z. Kami works with subtle elegance to obscure his material, and also the sign of his touch upon the canvas, evoking the look and feel of color photography with oil paint. Such soft-focus images are typically captured through a lens, a look seldom used in painting before the rise of photography. Kami lends depth to his subject through this approach—we see the young man disappearing before our eyes. By using paint in a manner that simultaneously suggests another material, Kami reinforces allusions to an omnipresent and growing tragedy at the time he painted the work: young men fading from life at the height of the AIDS crisis.

From the 2019 exhibition Entrance Gallery, curated by John R. Stomberg Ph.D, Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director

Course History

ANTH 50, COCO 2, HIV/AIDS Through a Biosocial Lens: 30 Years of a Modern Plague, Sienna Craig, Timothy Lahey, Spring 2013

COCO 2.3, ANTH 50.6, HIV/AIDS Through a Bio-social Lens: Thirty Years of a Modern Plague, Sienna Craig, Timothy Lahey, Spring 2015

GEOG 17, Geopolitics and Third World Development, Patricia Lopez, Spring 2015

GEOG 17, Geopolitics and Third World Development, Patricia Lopez, Spring 2015

GEOG 80.10, COVID-19, Abby Neely, Spring 2022

ANTH 55.01, Anthropology of Global Health, Anne Sosin, Fall 2022

GEOG 11.01, Qualitative Methods, Abigail Neely, Fall 2022

Comparative Literature 49.09/English 53.49, Graphic Medicine, Michael Chaney, Winter 2023

Anthropology 55.01, Anthropology of Global Health, Anne Sosin, Spring 2023

Anthropology 55.01, Anthropology of Global Health, Anne Sosin, Fall 2023

Studio Art 25.01, Painting I, Lucy Mink Covello, Winter 2024

Anthropology 55.01, Anthropology of Global Health, Anne Sosin, Spring 2024

Geography 21.01, International Studies 18.01, Global Health and Society, Anne Sosin, Spring 2024

Exhibition History

A Space for Dialogue 36, The Eye of the Beheld, Caitlin Roberts, Class of 2008, Student Programming Intern, Main Lobby, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 30-March 18, 2007.

A Space for Dialogue 76, Modern Melancholy, Jane Cavalier, Class of 2014, Class of 1954 Intern, Ivan Albright Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, March 30-May 26, 2013.

Entrance Gallery, Luise and Morton Kaish Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 26-August 11, 2019.

Publication History

Brian P. Kennedy and Emily Shubert Burke, Modern and Contemporary Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover: Trustees of Dartmouth College, 2009 p.84, no.60.

Jane Cavalier, A Space for Dialogue 76, Modern Melancholy, Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2013, ill. p. 3.

Provenance

Deitch Projects, New York;sold to Hugh J. Freund, Bedford, New York; given to present collection, 2002.

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