Dustin Yellin

Monica Blignaut
Jan 13, 2021
2 min read

Updated: Jan 14, 2021

Artist 280

Dustin Yellin

Frozen cinema collage and resin art

Dustin Yellin (born 1975) is an American collage and resin artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York. His medium includes glass, collage, acrylic, and resin.

He is the founder and director of Pioneer Works. His foundation Pioneer Works is a multidisciplinary cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn that builds community through the arts and sciences to create an open and inspired world.

Yellin’s art practise focuses on making the hidden forces of nature and commerce legible.

Yellin primarily works through a unique form of 3-dimensional photomontage, in which paint, and images clipped from various print media are embedded within laminated glass sheets to form grand pictographic allegories, which the artist calls “frozen cinema”.

Today’s focus will be on his series Psychogeographies.

Yellin was inspired by the Situationist International (an artist and activist collaborative) ethos of mapping how desire affects the urban experience “pyschogeography” through mapping in art. Through this series he also collapse mental projection through cartography.

Here, he collects an exploded catalog of icons, thirsts, dreams, and even nightmares congeal as physical, humanoid, shapes.

Each work structures is a network of picture puzzle allegories that link the minds and bodies to the world metonymically, and back again.

Following various associative, and psychedelic logics, Yellin’s totems also allude to the Terracotta Army, a vast array of life-size clay funerary figures entombed within the mausoleum of Emperor Qin Shi Huang.

While these ancient figures were meant to serve their leader in the afterlife, the Psychogeographies invite viewers to engage with the legions of their own consciousness and its embodied emotions as well as that of our shared collective of our society.

Yellin often teases that paper itself might soon disappear, and as such, these works might become artificial fossiles trapping the material much like a prehistoric fly in amber.

These totemic and kaleidoscopic works often measure the history and fate of human consciousness within the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.

Yellin’s work captures the archival beauty of resin and his beautiful intricate autonomy of puzzles hold worlds within worlds. Their life size nature and delicacy despite their hard exterior evokes a sense of internal exploration.

The title he choose is a term normally used for intuitively exploring cities and his work leads you down the path of exploring the cities within yourself.