Last year’s yell is a collection of works by Kayla Jones Pulido that embrace the processes that translate fleeting moments of urgency into memories that can be dissected, analyzed, or held. Rather than the event, what happens in the work of honoring and maintaining this sense of urgency? Of clarity? 

The everyday forms and materials in Last year’s yell all began with a sense of urgency that has been abstracted and distanced, but not lost, through the process of translation from feeling, to thought, to material, to form.

A dog’s howl is dissected for study. A bowling ball is hollowed and thinned until it is thin enough to roll into scrolls, a blueprint of itself. Frozen chickens, already so abstracted, are almost unrecognizable cast in plaster. But there is renewal, too. The chickens’ mold is reformed in aggressively golden oatmeal. There is a megaphone, albeit a delicate one made of gridded rice paper. The dog’s silence isn’t quite complete. Its beheaded figure can be played like a French horn.

When we recall a memory, we are actually remembering the last time we remembered it, not the original event. This exhibition accepts the paradox that to study something is to transform it.

Kayla Jones Pulido received her Masters in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2023. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in New York, Virginia, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Kansas, and the UK.