Desert Island w/ Anto Yeldezian: 27th March, 2026.

Anto Yeldezian is a Tāmaki-based artist of Armenian heritage, who works amongst an expanded painting practice that often leans into methodologies of printmaking. Utilising methods of monoprinting, and stencils, along with a playful use of paint and material exploration.

Within his current solo show Desert Island on at Coastal Signs, Yeldezian presents a series of 7 large scale works on raw loose canvas. Installed in a manner in which the works almost engulf the gallery walls, and bring the space into a continuous field of symbols, and marks. 

The works themselves harness this heavy use of motifs, and symbols as a kind of centering point to the show. The references include camels, palm trees, oil pump-jacks, Homer Simpson's thirsty bird'; ancient fossils, the triple Gs of Canterbury Clothing Company, union jacks and logos of American defence and oil companies. 

Through the making of the work Yeldezian takes these symbols and applies them to various painterly techniques that almost pull them away from their own inherent meanings/references and into this place of a pattern-like language with its own set of meanings.

Maya caught up with Anto about the show as well as his overall practice.