Brenna Youngblood

Across each painting in “R.A..D…I..O.,” Brenna Youngblood’s latest exhibition at Roberts Projects, the artist laid out a dialogue between painting as either a stage or a window— a discourse between flatness and depth. Youngblood’s midsize chromatic paintings blazed against the soaring white walls of the gallery, but to appreciate each work’s inherent complexity required close viewing. The artist cleverly, and oftentimes humorously, employed an arsenal of tools and media that included layering, collage, drips, splatters, plastic molds, and photographic material, creating dense, enigmatic assemblages that served to expand and contract the depth of the pictorial space, both literally and metaphorically. The accumulation of textures, imagery, and motifs made each composition suggest hidden meanings, rendering each painting a collapsed cabinet of curiosities.

SUNSET, 2025, an arresting bright-yellow-and-orange painting, initially seemed like a cacophonous collage of disparate elements: thick swipes of goldenrod made via a palette knife, gobs of paint that appear to have been squeezed directly onto the canvas, a pair of keyholes, and a computer-generated image of bucolic sheep bathed in sunshine that lives within a paper-and-bottle-cap assemblage resembling a 1980s television. A Sunset Produce label—itself a graphic image of a sunset—dangles beneath the canvas, suspended from a tree branch adhered to the lower corner of the canvas, while what appear to be stenciled roses (a motif found throughout the exhibition) jut out in slight relief throughout the composition.

These elements seem idiosyncratic, but the mix of painterly gestures and assemblage creates an ambiguity of interpretation that invites closer inspection. Youngblood’s use of impasto draws attention to the artist’s subjectivity—the hand—while the mysterious locks, contextless sheep, organic tree branch, and produce label indicate the depth and breadth of the greater world of image-making outside the artist’s studio. SUNSET is a painting that makes us symbolically attach meaning and profundity to a two-dimensional canvas by linking colors, brand markers, and images that each recall the atmosphere or environmental qualities of a sunset.

The floral patterning found throughout many of the works invokes visual languages we might associate with wallpaper or textile design—think Christopher Wool’s pattern paintings. The repetitive use of roses was especially suggestive of commercial fabric within the context of America the Beautiful, 2025, a murky black composition with a ridged, almost skin-like surface that incorporates lyrics to Katharine Lee Bates’s patriotic poem and song “America the Beautiful” (1893). The words are embossed in white on black label-maker ribbon, and run across yet another television-like composition. Close inspection reveals that some lines of the song have been modified—words are either blacked out or parts of the labels are missing, rendering the text illegible. These crumbling lyrics seem as passé as the outdated television and ornamental floral motif, possibly suggesting that the song’s sentiment has collapsed and become equally obsolete.

A separate room featured photographic works (all made between 2007 and 2010) that served as valuable complements to the nine new paintings in the exhibition. Like the paintings, the colorfully saturated photographs at first glance appeared to comprise an arbitrary catalogue of peculiar objects, but when they were seen together and in the context of the fuller exhibition, a play on depth emerged. A sense of intimacy was felt as each photograph was closely cropped in on the subject matter, and the items depicted were so specific that it seemed that we were witness to Youngblood’s own subjective grasp at finding meaning in randomness. T.H.E.M., 2010, depicted a set of variously sized dolls and action figures held up by two disembodied left hands, while Light Switch, 2007, focused on a green light switch ensconced in a gold-flower design resting on a colorful paisley-and-floral textile. Each reads as a depiction of a “ready-made” collage and, hung alongside the paintings, suggested a kind of blueprint for the multilayered textural juxtapositions the artist manifests in her work on canvas.

With “R.A..D…I..O.” Youngblood demonstrated her ability to focus the viewer’s attention both across and through the canvas—challenging those apprehending her work to make meaning by parsing the parts and the whole. The strength of this presentation was in its ability to prod visitors to look closely, to engage in rebus-like play, studying formal, contextual, and symbolic gestures to find meaning in the world just beyond the everyday.