In the outer reaches of a Brooklyn, NY neighborhood called Red Hook, pushed up against the soggy banks of the East River lies an old factory building sprawling nearly half a city block. Inside is a behemoth of a space. Multiple floors of gallery space, a large event area, offices and a back yard complete with lush landscaping and a beer truck.
Enter Dustin Yellen, a Brooklyn NY based 3D sculptural artist. This is his vision, his world, and behind the gallery walls lies an expansive studio housing creations in various stages of completion.
Dustin's sculptures are something of a hyper conceptualuzed panorama. He infuses large slabs of glass with sculpted characters and figures assembling the panels into large 'cross section' style encasings.
On the process Dustin tells The Wild Magazine "I don’t use resin anymore but I did for years. It was really just a series of accidents. I was making paintings, collages on canvas—I love collage—and I was pouring resin over the collages, to sort of homogenize and seal them and I saw an optical quality in it. I built these Joseph Cornell-type boxes and I made these 3D collages with resin and then I was drawing inside the layers and around the objects. I realized I could draw in space and then all of a sudden I was drawing in layers of resin without the objects and I took off the wood boxes."
"I created my own taxonomy of specimens, starting with botanicals, inventing botanical specimens, and then insects, and then the human form. They were becoming larger and more life-sized, but I was getting allergic to the resin and I didn’t want to use it because it was very toxic for me, for the environment, for people helping me. I was freaking out because people liked what I was doing and I was making a living but at the same time I was going to die and I was scared. So I switched to glass because I didn’t want to die, and that was the only reason I did that. But it turned out much better because it’s more optical and archival, but more importantly, it’s not toxic."
The work is elegant and hallucinatory, telling the story of an alternate universe conjured in the reaches of the artist mind. I think it's best to hear him tell it...
“The universe and the mind are shadowy places seething with dark magic, seas of boundless depth and possibility, seething with joy and disaster.” - Dustin Yellen
View more of Dustin's work: https://dustinyellin.com
Check out Pioneer Works: https://pioneerworks.org
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