As a child in the mountains of Colorado, Yellin found art in nature. “I was picking up sticks and rocks and seeing the multitudes of history in the rocks,” he says. “I always thought that a rock was a beautiful sculpture. Timeless.”
He surmises that his road to art-making began “by stacking rocks and sticks, looking at teepees, traveling to distant lands.”
Yellin dropped out of high school and traveled through New Zealand, Australia and Asia. “I watched Woodstock, the documentary, and had my own little private 1960s in my mind,” he says. Later, he studied under “a strange physicist.” He ended up in New York in 1994. 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 was a lot quieter. And a lot cheaper,” he says.) He made collage paintings, which evolved into sculptures. “I was making a lot of collages and I poured resin on them and I saw an optical quality,” he says. “I was making a sort of Agnes Martin grid out of ripped up pages of a dictionary and I started creating these wood boxes, sort of like Joseph Cornell boxes, but putting found objects and layers of resin.”
He continues, “Then I started drawing around the objects, the way you would around a dead body. I realized that you could draw in space. I removed all the objects and created a strange, almost biological looking drawings or dendrites.”
Those grew in size after he moved to Brooklyn in the early 2000s. “The subject matter at the time didn’t change drastically, more the scale and process,” he says. Scaling up took a lot of learning. “In the beginning, I couldn’t even move a large piece,” he says. “We had to have riggers come and teach us how to move something with straps and a forklift or a gantry.”
In his series Psychogeographies, Yellin builds human forms with collage that are housed in glass. Some works from this series have been seen at the Kennedy Center and as part of a show with the New York City Ballet. The end goal, Yellin says, is to make one hundred twenty figures. He estimates the series to be a twelve-year project with about two to three years left until completion. It was inspired, in part, by the Terracotta Army in China. “I think it was an obsession that went off the rails,” he says of his own series.
Between 2016 and 2017, Yellin made “Migration in Four Parts.” Within the collages, viewers will find people of various ages and ethnicities, their images reflecting different eras of history. They come together in a mass exodus, seemingly looking for routes towards shelter, safety, and stability. “I was thinking a lot with that particular work about migration and about humanity moving from one body of land through the sea to another and trying to put different histories inside of it,” he says. “Obviously, probably feeling the news cycles as well.”
I think a lot of the work is about trapping consciousness or trying to make maps of what’s inside the brain, using the media-found images that are stuck in the quotidian rhythms of our everyday views.”