Persistence Module l (yell), 2026. A Trashroom Gallery Show by New York based artist Yell Freeman. Copy paper, inkjet ink.

A somatic blueprint of transition and mechanical decay, this work maps the limits of the reachable body through the clinical lens of a flatbed copier. By subjecting 61 intimate studies of my body to iterative generational loss, the human form deliberately dissolves into a landscape of topography, memory, and structural abstraction. It tracks a memory in flux, continuing until the point of origin is entirely overwritten by the beauty of the process.

In an exercise of endurance, Yell Freeman submits and yields their body to automation. Melding with machine, the transformative gesture, posits the human form as an abstraction into deliberate artificiality, without succumbing to the apparent obliteration of identity. In fact, the notion of the body as a political entity is ever present here. Freeman’s act is one of transgression and subversion. By synchronizing with machine, it is apparent that the aim is to invert self perception within this post industrial present. The societal punishment the body endures is what is suggested, and the wish to transform into the un recognizable is as close to a proposal for escape that we can see.