Brooklyn artist Evan Desmond Yee didn’t know that the vintage reels he bought at a California flea market contained porn starring ’70s XXX starlet Annie Sprinkle. Yee preserved these artifacts from “the Turn of the Age of Pornography” as altered sculptural objects in light boxes.
“I wanted to create something that looks like an advertising-fetish object and still retains its historical and preservational beauty,” the artist tells ANIMAL.
I visited his workspace in the Hamptoms where Yee also welds metal sculptures with curious gravity. Growing up, both of his parents were yoga instructors, which explains Yee’s impulse to create visual balance in his abstract structures. He’s also “fossilized” an iPhone. “What I like this new digital age is that the more real it gets the less we are in the present reality,” the Pratt Institute graduate explains.
Watch the video of Yee’s studio visit above and see his work in the upcoming group show at Galerie Protégé in Chelsea opening October 17th. (Video: Yossera Bouchtia/ANIMAL New York)
