“Shape shifters” is the term Yashua Klos uses to describe the human figures he creates from collaged pieces of paper that have been painted or printed with woodblock, a selection of which feature at Tilton Gallery. In God of the Ghetto (all works 2015), a floating head with eyes downcast is splintered, mid-cranium, with urban debris—cinderblocks, two-by-fours, and other detritus—formed into a cubist-leaning construction as though leaching out of the subject’s mind. But this representation of distorted physical form is actually a commentary on the opposite: While one’s physical being can stay the same, its perception can drastically shift in different social spheres.Klos has developed a body of work that explores the shifts the black male body has been socially trained to undergo. At an early age, he learned that he and his friends would need to be invisible at times, powerful and impenetrable at others, when met with social confrontations. The forms he has created here—in collage, as well as woodblock prints and more abstractly in two wooden sculptural works—are shown slipping into and around gridded abstract structures as though spliced by the very brick-and-mortar components of our societal surroundings. In Become A Ghost, a wooden plank splits a disembodied head in two, passing through at the cheekbone and separating nose, lips, and chin from the rest of the form. But is this figure passing through the plane or being split in two by it?Four collages—one featuring a foreshortened body on a table, the others abstract blocky works—are mounted directly to the wall, vulnerable without frames or glass shields. In many cases, not all of the paper scrap is fully adhered and parts of the construction peel out toward the viewer. Yet by the same token, the lack of security reveals their durability and strength. In these unsheltered pieces, Klos reveals his mastery: uniting dualities.A version of this article appears in the November 2015 issue of Modern Painters.
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