Kedela wer kalyakoorl ngalak Wadjak boodjak yaak.

Today and always, we stand on the traditional land of the Whadjuk Noongar people.

Yok & Sheryo Badland bats 2020 (detail). Hand-carved Suar wood, 51 x 33 x 14 cm. Courtesy Yok  Sheryo.

Yok & Sheryo

Gallery 04
Until 13 February

Yok & Sheryo are an artist couple based between Bali and New York. A painter and filmmaker, Sheryo grew up in Singapore and began her acclaimed mural practice in 2005. Yok is originally from Perth and after taking inspiration from skateboarding graphics and Ren and Stimpy cartoons, became a key early player in the city’s street art scene. The two have created together since 2012 (first in a Brooklyn studio and now in Bali), and have earned a unique place in the international art world.

Fed by their curious natures and extensive travel, their playfully hybrid, freewheeling work has appeared on walls and in galleries around the globe, as well as in collaboration with companies such as Google, Nike, Adidas, Vans, Converse, Hypebeast, and Billionaire Boys Club.

Soaking up influences and ideas as they move, their works collapse traditional forms and contemporary modes of art, craft and design to populate a fictional tropical land called “Yeahnahnesia”, a place filled with its own eccentric Gods, myths, shrines, temples and creatures.

“We really don’t take ourselves seriously and our art is like that too.” — Sheryo, Hypebeast

AGWA presents four hand-carved figures, some of Yeahnahnesia’s most recent members. Double Fish Bonanza and Fortune Favours the Bold are shrines for luck, both asking for offerings, visually paying out on prayers and encouraging daring on behalf of those who worship. Nocturnal Natas and Badland Bats are totems that blend humans with bats, dragons and pigs, that might be consulted to ward off danger in difficult times and in scary places (including the digital realm of computer virus warfare that Natas references).