Matt Yoho finds his way back with ‘Alright So Far’

Roughly 15 years ago, Matt Yoho held a pair of solo exhibitions over a stretch of 18 months or so at the now-defunct CS Gallery on Parsons Avenue and then receded from showing or even making art – a decision he believed for a time would be permanent.

“I thought, well, that’s it. I’m just going to get a normal 9-to-5 job and worry about my IRA,” Yoho said in early April from Awesome Gallery, where his new retrospective exhibition, “Alright So Far,” will kick off with an opening reception from 1-3 p.m. on Saturday, April 11. “It was like I had some sort of block or avoidance to it. … I don’t know. That magic of it was just gone. It was gone.”

Early in the pandemic, however, the creative urge returned, Yoho first experimenting with a series of ink and black paint portraits, each based on a different photograph. Blending chaos (he diluted the ink with water and toyed with the way it bloomed on the page when released from an eyedropper) and control (more sharply defined features painted with a brush), the portraits, in a way, could be read as a desire for connection, surfacing at a point in time when Covid had severed a number of those contacts and a few years after a 2017 suicide attempt led Yoho to retreat further inward. Owing to this, Yoho said at least initially little changed for him as the lockdown took hold.

“I still went out once a week to get groceries, and I still stayed at home. … But, yeah, there was definitely a sense of looking for connection with other people [in the ink series], because when you draw somebody, you inevitably start making up stories about them,” said Yoho, who has depression, anxiety, and PTSD, and added that it’s only in the last couple of years that he’s “begun to claw my way back” with better dialed in medication. 

These more recent ink portraits are dispersed at the gallery in between a series of large paintings on canvas culled from Yoho’s solo shows at CS Gallery, including a pair of striking self-portraits done roughly a year apart. The first shows a wide-eyed Yoho with a red, Joker-esque grin painted on his face and an Effexor pill clinched between his teeth. “It’s an antidepressant I was on for quite some time, and then they stopped working,” the artist said.

The second features Yoho’s visage centered on a red ink blotch, some of its extended tendrils reading as devilish horns. Taken from his second solo show, the artist has titled the portrait “Ego,” describing it as reflective of a time when he became overtaken by an inflated sense of self. “Though it didn’t last long,” he added, recalling how that second exhibition fell short of his expectations, leading him to take his first steps away from the art world.

Inkblots feature in a number of the works on display, an inclusion Yoho credited to a lifelong fascination with psychology, and in particular to some of its more fringe elements, such as phrenology and palm reading. As a younger man, Yoho procured the Rorschach Inkblot Test manual, copying passages from the text in a notebook as he attempted “to work through some of my own personal stuff,” as he explained it.

The earliest canvases on display served as a similar purpose for the artist, enabling him to begin to wrangle with the depression and suicidal thoughts that at times threatened to overwhelm. Such is the case with a large-scale painting of a gun done in acrylics and glittering spray paint, and which Yoho said he painted as a means to untangle to suicidal ideation he felt then and continues to struggle with nearly 15 years later. “I wouldn’t say my mental health has extraordinarily changed,” he said, “but I’m better medicated now.”

One thing that has changed, though, is the drive that Yoho feels to create. Earlier in his career, he said, he was motivated by a sense of urgency, describing his work at the time as a desperate attempt to transmit the thoughts that clouded his brain to the canvas, where he might better make sense of them. “Because wrestling with things in your head, that’s like trying to wrestle with an eel that’s covered in snot,” said Yoho, whose more recent works could be seen as a more outward expression, incorporating Covid-era portraits of masked friends and the inkblot photo series, as well as an idea he has for a new series of works centered on women graced with white-tail deer antlers. “Right now, I’m just trying to get back in the groove of drawing and creating things.”