Dustin Yellin
JANUARY 26 - MARCH 1, 2008
Presented as Patricia Faure Gallery at Bergamot Station, Santa Monica.
Dustin Yellin
January 26 - March 1, 2008
From January 26 to March 1, 2008, New York-based artist Dustin Yellin will exhibit new work at Patricia Faure Gallery in Santa Monica, California. At a distance his work evokes insects preserved in amber, or frozen seaweed floating in place. Upon closer inspection, the viewer notices that something is not quite right. These aren’t animals. These aren’t plants. And then come the Linnaean-sounding names: Autolaria Simulatus, Oculus Lufus, Quasisoma Ocella—hinting at an academic order of classification, yet mockingly referential and aloof. Then the viewer begins to understand: the taxonomy on view is not the work of nature; rather, it is the work of the artist’s imagination—an elegant fiction of ink and layered resin.
By definition Yellin’s process is strikingly simple: he imbues layer upon layer of resin with ink pigment to create a three-dimensional drawing trapped in resin. However, much like the seemingly simple forms of nature that he redesigns, Yellin’s pieces take a long period of time to fully develop. Completing a single resin and ink layer per day, Yellin can take up to a full year to shape a single work. But what we see at the end of this exacting process is a reinvigorated argument for the relevance of drawing—an act in which Yellin engages effortlessly and organically over three dimensions.
Born in California, raised in Colorado and currently living in New York City, Yellin has exhibited at Robert Miller Gallery and Guild and Greyshkul, and counts celebrities Claire Danes, Kate Hudson, Ben Stiller and Graham Nash, artists Ernesto Caivano and Francesco Clemente, and heirs/heiresses Nicola Bulgari, Jamie Johnson and Ivanka Drumpf among his collector base. And though Yellin credits an instance in which a bee got trapped in a collage he was making for a friend as impetus for the direction of his work, – “I continued to pour on the resin to submerge the insect completely; as it got thicker, I started to see a strange optical quality, like a magnifying glass,” – Patricia Faure Gallery is quick to note that no animals or plants were intentionally harmed in Yellin’s upcoming exhibition.
