With With: Out for Leisure, 2024

With With is an ongoing project by collaborating artists Kyle Canyon and Yin Ming Wong. The production engages in site-specific installations to experiment with acts of spontaneous art-making and fast-paced co-curation. This process intermingles Canyon and Wong’s personal practices into a new methodology. The project’s title, With With, uses repetition to play with ideas of variations in a genus-like quality; a consciously collaborative collection of work. The title simultaneously comments on the collective act of art making and recurring motifs. The work explores questions of togetherness, same-ness, and individual identity, while also considering the possible psychological responses that come with any individual experience of the installation depending on the constantly changing contexts of the space.

For the project’s third installment, With With: Out for Leisure, the duo inhabit the Newport Art Museum’s School to exhibit their newest installation. In short, the works in this iteration draw an interest from the museum’s history of dual-residency and summer tourism. A parallel to both artist’s relationship to Newport, Rhode Island. The “Stick Style” Griswold house was built in 1864 as a summer home for the New York-based Griswold family. In a similar vein, Howard Gardiner Cushing also summered with his family in Newport. Cushing, like many wealthy Boston painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, focused on painting the elegant life of leisures. In more recent history, we find the School supporting the next generation of artists through summer camps. Aiding art-loving vacationers. Many are from out of state. These examples articulate decades of travel and leisure tied to the property’s history. But how does this all connect back to the duo? Canyon is a Newport local who met Wong while attending an undergraduate program in NYC. Since then, the two have traveled between states partaking in leisurely activities. The dichotomy between Rhode Island and New York is vital to the artists for this installation. Voyaging between the two holds a distinct experience they know Cushing and Griswold were accustomed to. Parallel to the interest in the space’s history, the displayed artworks in the installation are hyper obsessed with acts of leisure. The works physically mimic travel ephemera, hotel interiors, and vacation moodboards. The anthropomorphic and humanoid characters in these works experiment with performance, relaxation, solitude and express fluidly as both object and emotion. In this installment, we find Wong painting with oil and watercolor, while Canyon works with methods of illustration, sewing and risograph printing.

Yin Ming Wong and Kyle Canyon encourage viewers to visit the works by Howard Gardiner Cushing in the Cushing Gallery. With With: Out for Leisure has distinct correlations to specific motifs found within the Cushing exhibition. The artists invite observers to find the correlations between the two.