HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

May 24 – June 30, 2025 | 79 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY
For further information please email contact@halseymckay.com
Opening reception, Saturday, May 24, 4 – 7 pm

Halsey McKay Gallery is pleased to present Foreign and Domestic, Will Yackulic’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Yakulic’s small-scale works embrace an immediate, observational approach to painting through deftly rendered moments of daily life. The works on view were produced over the course of a year living in and traveling around Sweden, alongside paintings made directly after his return to the United States.

There are pictures here that capture fleeting moments from his home in the Bay Area, but Domestic also refers to Yackulic’s quotidian source material: sinks, a kitchen timer, soap, charcuterie, an unspooled cassette tape, or a pot on a stove’s blue flame. Much of his source material is derived from smart phone photos shot while on errands or doing chores around the home. Others, clearly depict the North light of Scandanavia, yet also capture something other, something Foreign, beyond national origin.

A pictorial strength of Yackulic’s is finding strangeness in the familiar. The way in which a sharp triangle of orange paint is both itself and light on the pavement between two buildings in late afternoon. Barely painted dollops of grey read as a blurry image of traffic, or a crisp rendering of street lights in a fog. Returning home after a long time spent elsewhere renders the familiar strange to the same degree as going to other environs does in the first place. This is not to say oneneeds to go much of anywhere at all to look at the world in a new way, but it certainly encourages it.

So much changes over time that paying attention constantly affords seeing things in a new way. Reaching middle age, raising a child, and caring for aging parents makes the passage of time very apparent. Which is how Yackulic came to dedicating his practice full-time to these paintings from life. The routines of this new life space revealed moments that stood out from the strictly procedural. These are the moments that he captures first as a snapshot, then later in paint.

Will Yakulic was born in 1975 in New York City and now lives and works in Berkeley, CA. He received a BFA from SUNY Purchase, studied at Lacoste Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Lacoste, France and Hogeschool vor de Kunsten in Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include et. al, San Francico, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. Yackulic’s art has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, Modern Painters, Flash Art, and the Los Angeles Times.