Jason Yates: It Meant Something Before, But Now It Means Nothing engages the afterlives of American cultural symbols — objects, characters, and images that once carried clear collective meaning but now persist in altered, ambiguous forms. Drawing from vernacular design, folk and outsider art, and the detritus of mass culture, Yates treats familiar imagery as unstable artifacts: simultaneously sincere and absurd, comforting and unsettling. Working across sculpture, painting, drawing, and assemblage, he transforms culturally familiar forms into psychologically charged encounters with memory, obsolescence, and symbolic exhaustion — approaching popular culture not as critique but as a site of emotional inheritance, where outdated feelings continue to exert force long after their original meanings have eroded.