IN A TIME SHAPED BY IMMEDIACY AND COMPRESSION, THIS ARTIST’S WORK INSISTS ON DURATION, ASKING VIEWERS TO SLOW THEIR PACE AS IMAGES SHIFT, OVERLAP, AND RECONFIGURE THROUGH MOVEMENT AND SUSTAINED ATTENTION

BY EMMA FLOYD

Working between sheets of laminated glass, Dustin Yellin constructs large-scale sculptures where images accumulate, overlap, and shift through movement and time. Originally from the West Coast, Dustin Yellin arrived in New York as a largely self-taught artist who prioritized studio practice over formal training, a decision that shaped the physical intensity of his work. Based in Brooklyn, Yellin constructs worlds between sheets of glass. His monumental sculptures are three-dimensional collages that defy categorization, existing somewhere between painting and sculpture.

Yellin’s process requires dedication and is both time-intensive and painstaking, yet entirely immersive. Hundreds of images clipped from magazines, art books, scientific journals, and historical texts are embedded into laminated sheets of glass, building layers that create depth and dimensionality. His early experiments with resin and plexiglass eventually led to glass, which allowed for greater clarity, durability, and scale. As viewers move around the work, figures emerge and recede, visual narratives intersect, and images reorganize themselves through motion, creating a sense of simultaneity rather than linear progression.

Beyond his studio practice, Yellin is the founder of Pioneer Works, the multidisciplinary arts and sciences center he established in Red Hook in 2012. Pioneer Works operates as a platform for collaboration across disciplines, hosting exhibitions, residencies, performances, and public programs that bring together artists, scientists, musicians, and scholars. For Yellin, the institution extends his passion, positioning art as both a visual and social structure. As his work continues to evolve, Yellin is committed to his craft in scale, accumulation, and physical labor, exploring the central components of meaning. His glass sculptures offer fewer conclusions or fixed interpretations, but they call upon the viewer to reflect, rewarding patience and proximity.

In recent years, Yellin has presented new glass works alongside paintings, expanding how his practice occupies space and surface. The paintings function less as departures than as parallel structures, carrying the same density and compression found in his sculptural work. Figures and symbols appear suspended within temporal references, placing ancient iconography along side speculative and technological imagery. Together, these works continue Yellin’s interest in how bodies, histories, and environments coexist within a single visual field. One of Yellin’s most recognized bodies of work, Psychogeographies, features life-size human figures assembled through dense accumulations of imagery. These translucent bodies shift in contained ecosystems of reference, where organic forms coexist with industrial fragments, symbolic motifs, and architectural structures. Rather than presenting a single storyline, the works operate together to create layered environments, asking viewers to navigate complexity rather than resolve it. dustinyellin.com