Dustin Yellin is about as synonymous with his studio neighborhood as an artist can be. Nearly 20 years ago, the California-born, Colorado-raised artist set up a studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a then-unlucky neighborhood set against the city’s historic shipyards and industrial warehouses. It remained there, moving between the three local studios. He further solidified his commitment to the neighborhood when, in 2012, he founded Pioneer Works, a nonprofit art space to bring together artists, scientists, inventors, musicians and more in one. space. He has since become a leading force in the Red Hook community.
Installation view of “Dustin Yellin: Cave painting at Venus over Manhattan”, New York, 2023.
Over these years, Yellin’s artistic star has also grown through his life-size sculptures containing layers of multimedia collage and paint, offering fantastical visions trapped in glass or acrylic. These dazzling works shift from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, depending on the position of the viewer. In his most famous series,Psychogeopraphiesthese collages take the form of human figures, seeming to explode with lush imagery often drawn from the natural world.
Although best known for sculpture, Yellin is also a dedicated painter. Right now, New York’s Venus Over Manhattan presents “Dustin Yellin: rock painting,” an exhibition of recently completed canvases exploring cave imagery and themes. These paintings consider caves both as fascinating natural phenomena as well as metaphorical spaces and chambers for the preservation or concealment of stories, artifacts and secrets. The product of a painting, Zia Copernicus Falls No. 4 (2023)are given to Hang Sơn Đoòng, one of the largest natural caves in the world, located in Vietnam.
Recently, we caught up with Yellin at his Red Hook studio, where the energy constantly buzzes with music and power tools.
Tell us about your studio. Where is it, how did you find it, what type of space is it?
I’ve been at Red Hook for about 17 years. I started out in a small studio in the area before moving into a bigger one, which was later destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. I was just starting to renovate Pioneer Works at the time, and the building next door became available, so I moved in. It was a run-down warehouse then, but it had good bones for a studio: high ceilings, lots of natural light, plenty of room to think, paint, sand, cut, draw, cook, etc.
Courtesy of Dustin Yellin Studio.
Do you have studio assistants or other team members working with you? What are they doing?
I have a lot of talented people who help me work every day. From painters and fabricators to my office team, everyone plays a crucial role in this ecosystem. Painters do everything from cutting things out of National geographic magazines for detailing flowers, mushrooms, artifacts, roots, tunnels, arches, caves, rocks, suns, moons, fish, etc. My shop team helps with sanding the work, moving the (very heavy) carvings and a myriad of other things. My office team keeps everything organized – they manage my evolving archive, keep track of where works are at any given time, and work closely with museums, galleries and potential project collaborators. The list continues.
Courtesy of Dustin Yellin Studio.
What are you working on at the moment? Please send us a few photos taken with your smartphone of a job in progress – or photos of different jobs in various stages of completion – in a way that you think will give insight into your process.
I work on collages, sculptures, animations and many other strange investigations. I gently end the “Psychogeographies.” I’ve spent the last year working on paintings for my exhibition”Cave painting” to Venus over Manhattan. I’m also working on a cast stainless steel sculpture made up of 75 disparate pieces, titled Emergence. He is a humanoid figure descended from a primordial prebiotic soup from which all life on Earth developed. The form emerges from the solar eclipse of 1919 which [astronomer Arthur] Eddington observed to help prove the theory of general relativity. Two-dimensional figures emerge from the eclipse and then transform into three-dimensional figures.
Courtesy of Dustin Yellin Studio.
There’s a cat with a dog’s ass who looks into the toilet to see his reflection like Narcissus. There is a goat looking into the cat’s eyes as an allusion to Renaissance paintings. The toilet sits on a Rubik’s Cube made up of a periodic table of elements. Above is a battery-operated frog licking a bagel that is a black hole. Then you have an ape man coming out of an ape brain. A council of pigeons meets under the volcano. At the top of the volcano is a moon with a reference to Sisyphus. The longer you look at it, the more you will find. He will go to well in Toronto next fall as a public installation.
I’m also working on an animation with a crocodile astronaut in blue jeans who visits a pastel pink desert dream world and then breakdances on a patch of sky into the sea. He flies into a whale’s mouth before a laser strikes the sun, causing it to explode and fall into the ocean. The whale eats pieces of sun. I’m still working on it.
Courtesy of Dustin Yellin Studio.
What tool or art supply do you most enjoy working with, and why? Please send us a picture of it.
In the seed of the heart, collage is where my juice rests. And when I say collage, I’m not just talking about paper. I make them with paper, yes, but also paint, metal, stones, wood… Anything can be a collage, and the materials used are interconnected membranes of matter that propel the mitochondria of our universe.
What atmosphere do you prefer when you work?
I love environments that buzz with productivity and collaboration. Places where you can feel the construction of something new floating in the air all the time. This energy can take many forms and different workflows combine in different ways in my practice. In Brooklyn, the studio is very collaborative, but my studio upstate is lonely.
My Brooklyn space buzzes with bodies and sounds. There are usually at least ten people working here on any given day – often more – and a constant stream of visitors, friends, students and Pioneer Works employees coming and going. During the warmer months the door to the studio is open and anyone can enter from the street.
My studio back home upstate is a little different. I can sit in silence, overlooking a lake, and listen to the orchestra of birds, insects and trees.
I like both modes of stimulation.
When you feel stuck while preparing for a show, what do you do to get out of it?
I try to go as far as possible, throwing myself into the most unpredictable and remote environments. Last month, a week before the opening of my exhibition, I walked through the largest known cave in the world in Vietnam, so vast that it has its own ecosystem. I need to observe the chaotic and natural processes of our Earth.
Or I read a poem.
Courtesy of Dustin Yellin Studio.
What images or objects do you look at while you work? Do you have other works by artists in your studio? If so, please share a phone photo and tell the story behind it.
I love objects and artifacts, and my workshop is full of them. I am surrounded by books, animal bones, stones, an old jukebox and antique mannequin heads. Part of my collection lives on an altar at the entrance to the studio: massive seashells, glass apothecary jars, cracked paintings, a Darth Vader mask, a desiccated honeycomb, medical models plastic, an old traffic light, a mummified cat… sit on a 12-foot wooden structure with a chicken coop in its center that once belonged to Genesis P-Orridge.
My studio is also filled with artwork from friends. My studio director, Colin Oulighan, is a badass artist, and I watch his work every day at the office.
Courtesy of Dustin Yellin Studio.
What was the last museum or gallery exhibit you saw that really stood out to you and why?
THE Wangechi Mutu exhibit at the New Museum blew my mind. It made me want to work harder and explore new ways of being and seeing.
Is there anything in your studio that a visitor might find surprising?
There are countless things one might find surprising about my studio, and that would probably vary widely from opinion to opinion. A person might just be surprised by the dynamics of the studio, the number of people working there, the constant energy and music and the murmur of power tools, the vastness of the space. For someone else, the most startling thing might be the sperm whale jaw hanging from the rafters, or the 450 million year old rock in the entrance.
Describe the space in three adjectives.
Crazy fucking bananas.
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