Robert Yoder

Yoder Prints

Block Fault

Block Fault (suite of 3)

There's seldom anything like a serious illness to sharpen one's focus and outlook on life. Twelve years ago, Seattle-based visiting artist Robert Yoder was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. The experience forced him to develop not only a new outlook on life, but a new perspective. During the time he was being treated for his illness, he explains that he "did a lot of looking, because I didn't have the strength to do anything else." Much of the time he spent gazing down at the floor.
This experience subsequently stimulated an interest in overhead views---looking down at the landscape from a perspective commonly observed by today's legions of air travelers. For Yoder, the challenge became how to translate what he saw in his mind's eye into an artistic statement. Fascinated by found objects, Yoder discovered a means to articulate his vision and ideas through the unlikely medium of retired wooden road signs he secured from the Seattle Department of Transportation. He cuts the signs into various sized pieces which he uses to create square or rectangular collages. He notes that "you don't have a lot to work with when you work with a sign," but he finds a "joy in working with intricate pieces and having the whole thing work out." The truncated letters and colored background of the signs become a new form of topography which resembles maps or urban plans. The nature of each piece he does is "dependent on the material you have on hand. The materials set up a limitation on what you can do." Additional materials he has used include children's plastic building blocks, hazard tape, paper pieces snipped from magazines, and shopping bags.
In every instance, Yoder explains in a statement prepared for the Froelick Gallery in Portland, Oregon, that he searches for answers to such questions as: "Where does architecture end and land begin? How do I represent multiple views of an object when that object doesn't exist?" He also notes that he is "interested in the way space can go back and then come forward" and "in multiple views that begin to look like one thing but then fall apart." The process can only go so far, however. "At some point, he says, "you have to make a decision and just go with it."