In His Debut Solo Exhibition with Almine Rech, Dustin Yellin Articulates Moments of Cosmic Storytelling

To gaze upon the art pieces of Dustin Yellin is to puzzle over societal questions. Paused in time, his epoxy resin and glass sculptures present an entire story in one moment. His colorful painted collages, driven by feeling, ask viewers to ponder veiled complexities. With “If a bird’s nest is nature, what is a house?,” the artist’s first solo exhibition with Almine Rech, all of these ideas converge.

“I’ve always admired Almine’s program and the range of incredible artists they’ve worked with over the years, like Calder and Turrell, as well as outstanding contemporaries like Claire Tabouret and Taryn Simon,” Yellin tells Surface. “The program is diverse, and multi-disciplinary, which is an essential part of any thoughtful gallery. I trust and respect their vision and execution, which is key! Those relationships, timing, and a confluence of aspirations resulted in this opportunity to work together.”

Yellin considers himself medium agnostic. “I prefer to follow concepts as they unfold, or lead me to the right format for their expression,” he says. Over the last three years, many of what he refers to as his obsessive fields of inquiry—including deep time, meteorites, mycelial networks, cave drawings, and systems of archiving—have taken shape as paintings. “While these themes have always been present in my sculptures, the inherent flatness of painting presents new challenges, especially around surfaces, scale, and legibility,” he says.

“Understanding how to navigate those challenges led me to this show, which uses both painting and sculpture to tell stories and create experiences about the origins of our universe, the intelligence of nature, the infinite possibility of space, and how humans construct meaning by building things,” Yellin adds.

At the heart of the exhibition is The Consequential Nature of the Simultaneous, an ornate sculpture that extends for nearly four feet. Yellin began developing the themes of the work years ago—in an even larger sculpture called Politics of Eternity. “This itself was inspired by many historic works, including The Garden of Earthly Delights,” he says. “I struggle with the idea that humans have the capacity to be conscious of all that is happening in the universe at any given moment. A struggle with the physical body being stuck in one point of space in any given moment while still being conscious of all points in the space-time continuum.” Beneath this is an understanding that as the internet overloaded us, machine learning may create a new method to offload and process.

Within the exhibition, sculptural works like “Pliny the Younger” and “Arcadia to Empire” bear anachronistic Yellin visual signatures but question something different: technological change as advancement or our undoing. “‘Arcadia to Empire’ creates a bed in which we begin to think about nature versus technology, and nature as a technology,” he explains. “The stone bridge is made of rocks [natural systems], yet when arranged to cross over the water they become a technology to navigate the natural world. The more of these navigations humans compose, the more altered [technological] the world becomes.”

Outside of the exhibition, Yellin continues to steward the vision for the Red Hook, Brooklyn-based, artist and scientist-led cultural center, Pioneer Works. “Pioneer Works is like a 14 year old child. It’s beginning to adapt a point of view and a history and a desire to grow and to become what it will be,” he says. “With Pioneer Works, I always struggle with a similar dynamic, which is to have all of the various disciplines—art, science, music, technology—percolate at the same density.” He notes that as the idea of school will shift dramatically under the influences of artificial intelligence, so too will free public spaces like Pioneer Works. Here, he believes, “humans gather to collaborate, to build their ideas together, and to learn from each other.”