Winston Wächter
July 30 – August 2 Booth 403 www.winstonwachter.com
Winston Wächter Fine Art Seattle is honored to participate in the inaugural international Seattle Art Fair. In celebration of this event, we have created two exhibitions, a solo installation of artwork by Dustin Yellin in booth 403 at CenturyLink Field Event Center, and a group selection of our gallery artists at 203 Dexter Avenue North, Seattle.
Dustin Yellin Born in California in 1975 and raised in Colorado, Dustin Yellin is a contemporary artist living in Brooklyn, New York, best-known for his sculptural paintings. Multiple glass layers, each individually embellished, create a unified intricate, three-dimensional collage. Yellin’s figures grow from thousands of antique clippings assembled in dense, tangled cellular silhouettes, as if man himself is no more than loose, disconnected images, a knotted form animated by partial truths. His art is notable both for its massive scale and its fantastic, dystopian themes. e work displays Yellin’s surreal romance with the detailed genius of the natural world and humankind’s dubious efforts to improve it. Yellin’s “psychogeography” sculptures have been met with international acclaim. In 2015, Yellin was honored with participation in the New York City Ballet’s Lincoln Center Art Series, installing fifteen life-sized sculptures. e success of this installation led to further exhibition of the figures at e Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.. In July of 2015 Yellin will install his first outdoor grouping of sculptures on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Yellin’s work explores the human narrative, and the connection we all have with the natural world. His passion for both art and science have lead to lectures at both the 2014 & 2015 TED conferences. He continues this exploration through his non-profit, Pioneer Works, in Redhood, Brooklyn, where he hosts simultaneous residencies with artists, musicians and scientists.
Read more about Yellin in Cultured Magazine and Vanity Fair.
206.652.5855
gallery@winstonwachter.com
www.winstonwachter.com
Dustin Yellin Psychogeography 74 2015 mixed media 72 x 27 x 15 inches with detail images Cover: detail image
Dustin Yellin Psychogeography 67 2015 mixed media 35 x 13.75 x 7.75 inches with detail image
Dustin Yellin Psychogeography 72 2015 mixed media 35 x 13.75 x 7.75 inches with detail image
Crushed paper, ephemera, and found objects are manipulated into strata reminiscent of sedimentary compressions. ey are archaeological records in the making. ese pieces of paper sourced from magazines from the 1950s and atlases from the 1930s, paintings from the 19th century and ads from the 80s, come together to form a sort of anticipatory artifact. Yellin seems to be sculpting in time, sculpting with time, and as much as these time machines transport the viewer into the age from which their elements are sourced, we are simultaneously catapulted into the consciousness of those who will proceed us, contextualizing and questioning the facets of expression and presentation intrinsic to our own contemporary culture. In this way, a gaze into the Ant Farms reflects a picture of ourselves as relics, as remnants.
Dustin Yellin Ant Farm, Swan Jr. (Life April ’42, NatGeo April ‘86, Letters ’61) 2015 Mixed media 19 x 19 inches Ant Farm, e People’s Pocket Companion (Life April ‘74, NatGeo Dec ’86, Letters ‘84) 2015 Mixed media 19 x 19 inches
Dustin Yellin, Ant Farm, Continue on Next Page (Life Dec ‘59, NatGeo April ’59, Life ‘99), 2015, 19 x 19 inches, with detail
Dustin Yellin, Psychogeohraphy 56, 2014, mixed media, 72 x 27 x 15 inches with detail image
Dustin Yellin Painting 109 2015 Acrylic on panel 74 x 74 inches
Nose Pressed Up Against the Glass: Dustin Yellin’s Metaphors of Opacity and Transparency KENNETH GOLDSMITH e web has become invisible. It is said that once a technology becomes commonplace, it is ripe for theorization and, subsequently, for artistic intervention. People were too busy playing Super Mario Brothers when it came out in the mid-1980s to détourne it. Fifteen years later, in an act of nostalgic deconstruction, Cory Arcangel took an old Super Mario Brothers Nintendo cartridge and erased everything but the clouds, creating a profoundly simple and effective meditation on the intersection of nature and technology. It is a move similar to the way Andy Warhol, in the early 1960s, employed silkscreen—another technology on its last legs—to weird ends. Warhol said, “I wanted to do a ‘bad book,’ just the way I’d done ‘bad movies’ and ‘bad art,’ because when you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up something.”1 By misusing the silkscreen—printing sloppily and off register—he rendered a transparent medium opaque. Similarly in the mid-1960s, Nam June Paik took a television—a medium that up until that moment was known to seamlessly deliver entertainment—and slapped a giant horseshoe magnet on the top of it, scrambling the once legible picture into cosmic abstract patterns. Nobody had ever thought to do that to a TV set before. Twenty years after the invention of the Internet, we’re finally ready not to think about it—or to think differently about it. We’re ready to return to meatspace. But something has changed; this isn’t the same terra firma we left back in the mid-1990s. rough the Internet, our sense of physical space has become reconfigured. A few years ago, the British theoretician James Bridle coined a term, “e New Aesthetic,” to describe the merging of these two realms. He claimed that images and ideas born online are materializing in our terrestrial space: just think of memes that appear on T-shirts or the very concept of 3-D printing. Twenty years ago, as we rushed to embrace the newness of the web, it seemed like meatspace was dead. Virtual reality pioneers claimed that we’d soon be living entirely online, looking at the world through clunky headsets, “touching” computer images with oversized VR gloves. Instead Google Glass entwines our physical bodies with online technology. Reflecting these changes, Post-Internet art reconciles the virtual and the meat by materializing natively born digital material IRL (in real life). Images that once existed exclusively online are now invading galleries, materializing as full-bodied art objects. But there’s another way to think about it. After years of financial bubbles and collapses, with the environment teetering on the brink, we’re seeing the emergence of art forms that celebrate with open-eyed awe the simple fact of our very existence—something hard to imagine even five years ago. From Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain movement to the hyper-sincere positivity of the Alt Lit writers, folks are embracing this terrestrial existence, which is dripping away from us every time a polar cap shrinks. e young Alt Lit writer Kenji Khozoei sums up our moment when he says, “Wow, what a wonderful day to continue to approach my inevitable death.” Call it the revenge of the real. At the intersection of these currents lies the work of Dustin Yellin, who’s been doing what he’s been doing for so long that the world’s finally caught up with him—or maybe he’s in sync with a moment. But that was never his intention. Instead, Yellin plays long ball. He’s fond of saying things like, “I think of one hundred years like a week,” or “I work on five-billion-year time scales.” You might counter, “But what about climate change?” “Nah,” he’d retort. “You’re being shortsighted.” When the East River came pouring neck-high into Pioneer Works, his newly renovated arts space, Yellin sat on a rooftop across the street in awe of nature’s power during Hurricane Sandy. “It was amazing,” he says with a big grin on his face. e waters receded, and indeed, life went on. Yellin says, “If you want to know what time frame I’m dealing with, look at the Chinese terra-cotta army or the stone cities of Angkor Wat, Petra, or Machu Picchu”—all places that Yellin visited during his formative years as an artist. A restless kid growing up in Colorado, Yellin found himself in his early teens working in a shop that sold geological artifacts: crystals, fossils, and petrified wood. Too young to be on the payroll, Yellin was happy to be compensated in minerals and meteorites. Concurrently, he became fascinated with cast-off exotic artifacts from visits to local flea markets with his dad. A restless social outcast with an insatiable curiosity, he dropped out of high school and hitchhiked across New Zealand, Asia, and ailand. Returning to Colorado, he fell in with a renegade physicist named Adam Trombly, who claimed to be able to harvest free energy from the power of UFOs. Trombly exposed Yellin to a panoply of alternative thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla, John Lilly, Aldous Huxley, and Timothy Leary. A child of the 1960s, Trombly was a believer in mind-altering drugs, experiments that Yellin was only too happy to partake in. Continue reading click here
Dustin Yellin Psychogeography 73 2015 mixed media 35 x 13.75 x 7.75 inches with detail image
Join us in the gallery for our special summer exhibition Tuesday – Saturday, from 10 – 5pm 203 Dexter Avenue North, Seattle, WA 98109 206.652.5855 www.winstonwachter.com
Annie Morris, Faces Painting, 2015, oil on canvas, 53.25 x 47.25 inches
Annie Morris, Stack 9 (Cadmium Red No. 3), 2015, mixed media, 76 x variable inches
Annie Morris, Stack 9 (Viridian Green), 2015, mixed media, 95 x variable inches
Angelina Nasso, Sympathetic Elements, 2015, oil on canvas, 68 x 78 inches
Angelina Nasso, Faith, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 27 inches
Angelina Nasso, Joy, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 27 inches
Etsuko Ichikawa, Trace 0312, 2012, glass pyrograph on paper, 22.5 x 22.5 inches
Etsuko Ichikawa, Trace 10711, 2011, glass pyrograph on paper, 22.5 x 22.5 inches
Etsuko Ichikawa, Trace 10114, 2014, glass pyrograph on paper, 17 x 17 inches
Miya Ando, Cerulean Leaf, 2015, mixed media, 43 x 43 inches
Miya Ando, Ephemeral Blue, mixed media, 36 x 36 inches
Kim Keever, Abstract 10166, 2014, c-print, variable dimensions
Kim Keever, Abstract 1150, 2014, c-print, variable dimensions
Kim Keever, Abstract 14566, 2014, c-print, variable dimensions
Introducing e Haas Brothers e Haas Brothers, twins Nikolai and Simon (b. 1984 Los Angeles), had a creative upbringing in Austin, Texas where their opera singer mother, actor brother, and sculptor father taught them to play music, write, sing and paint. Starting in their early teens, they studied stone carving under their father, mastering the craft before leaving home. e twins parted ways in 2003 to pursue their artistic goals individually. Simon studied painting at RISD while Nikolai toured as a musician with artists like Vincent Gallo, Sean Lennon and Jim O’Rourke through his early 20s. In 2007, the two reconvened in Los Angeles to tour with the band RRIICCEE, then founded the HAAS BROTHERS there in 2010 when L.A. architects Johnston Marklee offered a chance to collaborate on a friend’s project. e brothers received attention right away for their nimble craftsmanship and clever use of materials, and the few years since have seen them evolve from fabricators and collaborators to studio art innovators. In their current works, the Haas Brothers explore aesthetic and formal themes related to nature, science fiction, sexuality, psychedelia and color theory. eir mastery and unique us of materials ranging from brass, bronze, porcelain and fur to highly technical resins and polyurethane, matched with their insatiable curiosity and remarkable visual intelligence, sets them apart as artists.
Opposite clockwise: selected Accretion ceramic sculptures Fancy Wilson Mini Beast 2014 Mixed media 9.5 x 6 x 11 inches Jake Fuzzin Mini Beast 2015 Mixed media 10 x 6.5 x 5 inches
Seattle Art Fair Preview ursday July 30, 2015 6:00pm to 10:00pm
Complimentary VIP pass here
Friday, July 31 11:00am to 7:00pm Saturday, August 1 11:00am to 7:00pm
WaMu eater 800 Occidental Ave S Seattle, WA 98134 www.centurylinkfield.com
Sunday, August 2 12:00pm to 6:00pm
Winston Wächter Fine Art
Seattle
www.winstonwachter.com