How can returning to old wounds help us better understand the new world? 'Mad Madder Maddalena,' a solo exhibition by craft artist Isaac Yoder, is a study of the concentric impacts of historical, cultural, familial, and personal narratives on identity. The works featured in this exhibition are an embodiment of Yoder’s studio practice: a marriage of undervalued materials, overlooked domestic arts and craft techniques, and venerated imagery from both western art history canon and pop culture. With their making processes Yoder materially and conceptually challenges the social hierarchies within craft and fine art, capital, and gender. Mad Madder Maddalena is a collection of multiple series of works, starring a spectrum of reds, pinks, and browns in devotional images and self portraits of the artist as the complex biblical figure Mary Magdalene. These red hues are derived from processing the root of the madder plant; madder dyed textiles were widespread and of immense religious and economic significance in Medieval Europe. In their characteristic aesthetic, Yoder juxtaposes madder derived reds–and the historical baggage of this material–with thick layers of glitter, screen printed text, and polaroid images. This exhibition is a culmination of over two years worth of the artist’s journey to find grace while navigating a self-imposed authoritarian asceticism in their studio. Yoder’s expert craftspersonship is a vehicle for their fierce meditations on how examinations of the past can help us adapt, and change how we relate to and move through the world. 

Curated by Oliver Myhre

www.isaacyoder.weebly.com / @isaac.b.yoder