Yellin discovered art in nature when he was a child in the mountains of Colorado. “I picked up sticks and rocks and saw so much history in the rocks,” he said. “I’ve always thought of rocks as beautiful sculptures. Eternal.”
He speculates that his path to art began by “stacking rocks and sticks, looking at teepees, and traveling to faraway places.”
Yellin dropped out of high school and traveled to New Zealand, Australia and Asia. “I watched the Woodstock documentary and my own little story from the 1960s came to mind,” he said. Later, he studied with “a strange physicist.” In 1994, he came to New York. The city was different then, but so was he. “I was young and everything was new,” he recalls.
He found a small place in SoHo. (“It’s much quieter here. And much cheaper,” he says.) He created collages that evolved into sculptures. “I made a lot of collages and poured resin over them and I saw the optical quality,” he said. “I made a kind of Agnes Martin grid out of torn up dictionary pages, and then started making these wooden boxes, kind of like Joseph Cornell’s boxes, but with found objects and layers of resin placed in them.”
He continued, “Then I started drawing around objects, like drawing around corpses. I realized you could draw in space. I removed all the objects and created a strange, almost biological-looking drawing or dendrite.”
The houses grew in size after he moved to Brooklyn in the early 2000s. “The theme didn’t change dramatically back then, it was more about scale and process,” he said. Scaling requires a lot of learning. “At first, I couldn’t even move a big chunk,” he said. “We had to have riggers teach us how to move things with belts and forklifts or gantry.”
In his Psychogeography series, Yelling constructs human forms out of glass collages. Several works from the series have been performed at the Kennedy Center and as part of New York City Ballet’s productions. The ultimate goal, Yellin said, is to make a hundred and twenty figures. He estimates the series is a twelve-year project, with about two to three years left until completion. It was partly inspired by China’s Terracotta Warriors. “I think it was an obsession that went off the rails,” he said of his series.
Between 2016 and 2017, Yellin created “Four Parts of Immigration.” In the collages, viewers will find people of different ages and ethnicities, their images reflecting different historical eras. They fled en masse, seemingly in search of refuge, safety and stability. “I thought a lot about this particular piece about immigration and the movement of humans from one land to another through the ocean and trying to incorporate different histories into it,” he said. “Obviously, probably feeling the news cycle as well.”
I think a lot of the work is about capturing consciousness or trying to map the inside of the brain using images found in the media that fit the day-to-day rhythms of our everyday perspectives. “
