Dustin Yellin

Born in 1975, Los Angeles, CA
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Dustin Yellin was born in California in 1975 and raised in Colorado. Now living in Brooklyn, New York, Yellin’s works include paintings, drawings, installation, performance, and sculpture, comprised of clippings from magazines and books, paint and paper. Taken together, his work forms an archive of both gestures and images completely accumulative, yet never totalizing. Yellin archives material/images/gestures by including them in his malleable, shifting subjects, redefining what is “important” (what is thought to somehow define the subject) by including images of all kinds: sports stars, works of art, domestic objects, plants, animals. There is no privilege conferred on one image over another. Rather, they are set into place by an internal logic to each piece that dictates that all images are somehow related within his fragmentary, distended figures.

His large glass blocks recall, in their extreme hermeneutical diversity (forms within forms within forms, images within images within images) both a past in which the representation of the human form was art’s most recognizable enterprise and a future in which that enterprise is deeply complicated by the fact that the human form has been shredded, reformatted, revised, redesigned, and made precarious and permeable by technological and ecological shifts. Yellin’s work refers to particular art historical periods, Modernist collage and the redefinition of spatial relations via Cubism. They also evoke science fictional futures in which we cryogenically freeze ourselves to be shipped to some other, lusher world.

But Yellin is not a geographer of that world—or any particular world. Instead, his work abandons geography, history, place, and events altogether. His figures inhabit the psychotropos of the geographers themselves, those denizens of a world both immediately familiar and unfamiliar, figures whose existence points only toward the process by which they came to be. There is no rationale or logic to their seemingly sudden materialization in glass, except for the paradoxical visualization of logic and rationale’s twinned absence. Speechless, their silence seems ludic or drunken. And yet their silence fills the frenetic, high-definition space between chaos and organization in which we define our bodies and their social lives by their relation to their presence on networks online. Broken up, collaged: in their networked forms, the are a seemingly infinite series of linkages, more like micro-internets than human beings, getting to a now of total sprawl. In this sense, Yellin visualizes the intervening visual economies that embed other, larger systems within us in order to underscore our permeability (despite the work’s thick glass): one body, in the contents of its images, might suggest an ecology (our most vexed field of inquiry) as diverse as a subtropical forest, another might organize around and into an imaginary landscape. Another might suggest a city. Another might suggest nothing at all, only strokes of paint.

In 2015, from January to mid-March, The Triptych, Yellin's 24,000 pound (10,900 kg) masterwork, was displayed at S2, the New York gallery attached to worldwide auction house Sotheby's. Also in 2015, Yellin exhibited an ensemble of fifteen Psychogeographies at Lincoln Center, part of the New York City Ballet's annual Art Series initiative.

New work by Yellin will be exhibited in Richard Heller Gallery's booth, C4, at the Dallas Art Fair, 2018.