According to the creative, "All artworks are in their own way allegations and confessions." This idea is the core of his latest exhibition, titled Lie Detector.
Truthfulness is significant to Yaeger, who portrays his upbringing in a community in the American West as proper and ordinary. "We would sit down for dinner every evening, attend religious services every Sunday, and are courteous almost to a fault," he recalls.
His impressive work ethic is additional proof of a sound background. When interviewed in his workspace a week before the show opened, the 17 works for the exhibition were already finished, and the space was filled with paintings headed for his next show in New York. "Personally work far ahead, likely as a way of managing my own anxieties," he confesses with self-deprecation.
Though his early ambitions as a director were halted by the understanding that he is "a very, very poor organiser," his paintings are the outcome of both careful preparation and happenstance. "Truly," he says, "a lot of times the work just unfolds in front of you."
Now 39, Yaeger graduated with a graduate degree from London's Royal College of Art in recent years and is now much talked about in art circles. He works solely in watercolour over gesso on linen. Initially, his paintings, many monumentally large, appear like movie frames, with the gloss of a moist mouth or the papery crease of an eyelid preserved in shiny, ultra-realistic detail. Only upon close inspection that their textures reveal scars and pockmarks, and profound, regular fissures like those of a drought-ravaged river bed.
The subjects he portrays are in fact taken from movie shots extracted from their original contexts. The influence of the creator is visible in the fragments of pistachio shell, clumps of debris from the workspace, or foil wrapper from a biscuit, forever bound to the canvas like a dog's footprint in wet cement.
Yaeger writes a written piece for each show. In this instance, it is the record, we are informed, of a polygraph test undertaken by the artist, in which only his answers are revealed. It's a rambling, fragmentary document in which a observational incident with a neighbour is blended with what seems to be personal recollection, concerning his work, his daughter, his religious upbringing and critical analysis.
So did he really take a test? "In all important senses," Yaeger says enigmatically, adding that he thought the lie detector "was debunked long ago. As a method [of finding the truth] it's awkward and somewhat foolish. But as a symbol, there is a great deal of meaning that goes down into this feeble little machine, it's really powerful and sinister."
Instead of the deferential tone of the transcript, the artworks are inherently uncontrollable, like pieces of raw memory. Is a face grasped with violent force or erotic passion? Do eyes concealed behind a mask colluding or terrorised?
"After writing the text, I begin reviewing my archive of collected images and memories," Yaeger says. "I end up in these intense creative trances – you're completely gone as a conscious mind when creating, disappearing into an interior world that you are unable to express language for when you return." The reality that so much gloom surfaces in the works is integral to the journey. "I don't have profound, emotional scars," he states of himself. "It's likely that you're inherently possess sadness."
Despite no longer practicing, Yaeger's religious upbringing is ingrained, and Clean Windows Kill Birds, in which a woman's face is viewed through the screen of a confessional booth, is one of numerous overtly religious paintings he has made. A penitential tendency draws the creator to the challenge in his art – the hours spent painting on the floor, struggling with the basic conflict of watercolour and primer.
Partly as a consequence, there are many abandoned paintings beneath the surfaces, the evidence of which is visible on the bare edges of the borderless supports, which are thick with accumulations of built-up primer and color. The thing about the primer, notes Yaeger, is that the paint can be completely erased: "I could remove this to nothing." Rather, at the painting's edges, he tells a alternate tale – possibly the most important narrative of all, about our desire to make a mark, to leave a trace.
