The Palisades firestorm broke out several days before the scheduled opening of “Mothership,” Isabel Yellin’s solo exhibition at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University. Perched on a coastal bluff in Malibu, the museum had only just survived a previous wildfire that swept through the surrounding mountains in December 2024. When I finally made it to Yellin’s exhibition, the only open road that accessed the museum coiled through a once-verdant canyon now charred. This burn scar, a remnant from the earlier Franklin Fire, functioned as a fire gap that spared the campus from this latest inferno—a potent symbol of the power of a wound.
This context lent Yellin’s work an unplanned yet wholly appropriate sense of gravity. A raw and deeply intimate meditation on personal loss and trauma, the artist’s exhibition presented a suite of new paintings and sculptures—sinuous, beguiling abstractions—that she created in response to five recently discovered paintings made by her late mother, Anne Locksley, who died by suicide in 2008. Unbeknownst to her family until 2023, Locksley’s paintings—which were also on view here—had adorned the walls of the Columbia County Mental Health Center in upstate New York, where she had briefly received treatment for schizophrenia. Shortly after learning of their existence, Yellin retrieved the paintings on the fifteenth anniversary of her mother’s death, a moment she described as being something akin to a spiritual experience. In pairing their work for the first time, “Mothership” eschewed narrative explanation and instead offered a poetic, eulogistic ode to the artistic impulse shared between mother and daughter.
Though coincidental, the lines of hot-pink fire retardant that stained the hillsides outside the museum found uncanny echoes with Yellin’s work installed inside, where flesh-pink walls—a reference to the innards of the body—served as a backdrop for paintings and sculptures accented with meandering lines. In the sculptures, thin lines of white, powder-coated steel looped into mounds and towers of impossible tangles, which were interrupted in parts by large rubbery knots. These knots were composed of pliable silicone tubing, which in Mini Core 2, 2023, wove around the steel to form a convoluted pink mass, punctuating the work’s circuitous visual rhythm. Here, two disparate materials, one hard and one soft, grasp onto each other in a gesture rendered all the more potent by the tubing’s striking resemblance to an umbilical cord.
In Yellin’s paintings (all 2024), similar bodily references abounded. In Treat Others as You Want to Be Treated, for example, a muted steel-blue ground of liquid silicone swirled with ivory and coral dispersions, which morphed and coagulated into cellular clumps. Soft, milky tubes of silicone—the same material employed in the sculptures—floated on top of this watery suspension, forming a series of concentric rings that orbit around a pink organ reminiscent of a nipple or an ovary. In The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree, a tightly coiled heap of silicone similarly resembled a breast; elsewhere, Don’t Cry over Spilt Milk nodded to its titular mammalian secretions with spills of white fluid. In a material sleight of hand, these paintings, all silicone on canvas, appeared sopping wet, as if their surfaces were slick, amniotic pools of liquid—each one as glassy as an undisturbed puddle. This aqueous illusion hinted at states of healing and metamorphosis: Just as a liquid will evaporate and a scab will slough off to form a scar, the persistent wetness in Yellin’s paintings suggested a tender wound in the process of mending.
With watery compositions evoking voids and portals alongside the viscera of the body, Yellin’s paintings also alluded to the veiled depths of the psyche—one of the artist’s long-standing interests. And, while Locksley’s paintings predominantly presented impastoed landscapes and vivid florals, Untitled, 2005, featured a prismatic fall landscape that melted into a color-block abstraction, pointing to the fuzzy subconscious line that exists between memory and imagination. Here, rather than reveal or explain any formal affinities between the two (or the lack thereof), Yellin’s and Locksley’s paintings entered into a kind of epistolary dialogue, with the paintings themselves functioning as sites of psychic connection. The word mothership, which conjures a central, omnipresent entity with the capacity to bridge both space and time, is appropriate, and perhaps refers to the artistic yearning that impelled both mother and daughter and united them again here. Ultimately, by drawing on the preternatural power that our most precious objects and creations retain, Yellin offered a requiem for things lost and things found—a particularly stirring sentiment in Los Angeles today.
