MICHAEL YINGER
Michael L. Yinger shows his command of space to explore the concept of "home," with a personal sense of found materials and abstract political references. Raised in the heartland but a New Yorker since 2001, Yinger often deals with the shifting nature of his residence. Throughout his work he lays bare the addictions that plague him, his generation, his fellow New Yorkers and his country.
In one of the artist’s works, slumping down a wall, the American flag is featured prominently as a great behemoth felled by its own weight. Yinger’s flag is cobbled together using a wide range of materials including, but not limited to: bullets, petrol-soaked rags, plastic cups, glass shot glasses, a customized bottle of alcohol, toy trees, animal bones, lard, sand, and rocks. These are non-art objects that Yinger takes from everyday life while walking through Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The rebelliousness of Yinger’s gestural refusal of ideas of high and low, suggests the gritty hedonism of hipster dive-bars and a range of abuses, such as the gluttony and the pillage of natural resources.
Yinger’s instinct for recycling and resistance in the face of American abundance and freedom isn’t entirely a show of youthful rebellion. Yinger’s heroically scaled installations represent autobiographical elements, such as maps of the United States or Buddhist symbols. Yet his choice of materials, that are common to modern life, complicates the autobiographical idea by showing how public the personal is in contemporary society.
Michael Yinger was born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1973. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Hunter College, NY, New York. His work has been shown both nationally and internationally.