Winston W채chter Fine Art
Dustin Yellin
203 Dexter Ave North Seattle, WA 98109 [t] 206.652.5855 [e]gallery@winstonwachter.com www.winstonwachter.com
Dustin Yellin studio, Psychogeography installation, 2014
Left: Cindy Sherman. Untitled, 1975. 11 gelatin silver print cutouts mounted on board. 17 x 20. in. Right: Terracotta Warriors
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. 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 displays a ready willingness to experiment with forms and materials, using bizarre found objects, eccentric clippings from diverse sources, computer-generated images, acrylic, and glass.
In 2011, Yellin began a series of life-size figures, a collection of entombed quasi-humans inspired by the two-thousand year old Qin funerary army of “Terra-cotta Warriors and Horses”. 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.
Clockwise: Hieronymus Bosch. e Garden of Earthly Delights. Before 1593, Marcel Duchamp Fresh Widow.1920. Miniature French window, painted wood frame, and panes of glass covered with black leather, 30. x 17⅝ in., Dustin Yellin. Installation view of the Pyschogeographies
î “ese spirits sprout limbs of fog, spines of steam, humid heads. î “ey are beings without a solid or permanent existence: transparent, dissipating, ephemeral. Still others are Siamese twins whose deformed extremities explode in animate color. All underscore disquieting realities of the human condition, revealing morality as a relative construction and ethics as a subjective prejudice. Our brief, fibrous existence and unequivocal mortality is laid bare.
Detail of Psychogeography 48.
Opposite Left: Psychogeography 47. 2014. Glass, collage, acrylic. 72 x 27 x 15 in. Opposite Right: Psychogeography 48. 2014. Glass, collage, acrylic. 72 x 27 x 15 in.
Above: Detail of Psychogeography 31. Psychogeography 31. 2013. Glass, collage, acrylic. 72 x 27 x 15 in.
Dustin Yellin studio, Psychogeography installation, 2014
Above: Detail of Alarms of Summer. Alarms of Summer. 2014. Glass, collage, acrylic. 25. x 17â…› x 9. in.
Cave Installation, 2014
î “e Triptych. 2012. Glass, collage, acrylic. 212. x 46. x 27 in.
“e Triptych” is Yellin’s largest and most complex work, a massive 12-ton, three-paneled epic embodying his vision of the world and consciousness. For Yellin, “the universe and the mind are shadowy places seething with dark magic, seas of boundless depth and possibility, overflowing with joy and disaster.” In this composition of clippings, acrylic, and glass, Yellin presents a vicious, surreal spectacle. Instead of a glorious image of transcendent spirit, humankind is caught unawares by a divine reckoning. In this mythical, livid cataclysm, volcanic elemental forces smash the organized world into disconnected pieces. e preternatural scene recalls the orgiastic, aberrant violence of Bosch, with the wickedly sunny garden recast as an ominous, roiling sea. Confronted by colossal power, human technology is helpless and material progress is drowned.
e Triptych, left panel (front). 2012. Glass, collage, acrylic. 70. x 46. x 27 in. e Triptych, left panel (back). 2012. Glass, collage, acrylic. 70. x 46. x 27 in”.
e Triptych, middle panel (front). 2012. Glass, collage, acrylic. 70. x 46ó x 27 in.
Opposite: e Triptych, middle panel (back). 2012. Glass, collage, acrylic. 70. x 46ó x 27”.
e Triptych, right panel (front). 2012. Glass, collage, acrylic. 70. x 46ó x 27 in.
e Triptych, right panel (back). 2012. Glass, collage, acrylic. 70. x 46ó x 27 in.
In 2010, Yellin founded Pioneer Works, a social sculpture and non-profit institute for art and innovation in Red Hook. e capacious site is a venue for conceptual and creative cross-pollination, a quarter where resident artists and thinkers from diverse disciplines can interact without normative restrictions, ideally producing social change through innovative work. rough a community devoted to creative discourse and collaboration, Pioneer Works is a platform where ideas can manifest into their fullest expression. e Center enacts its vision for a more complex, creative and productive society through educational programming, exhibitions, publications, residencies, lectures and performances. Housed in a reclaimed former iron works factory, Pioneer Works is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.