We will learn Dustin Yellin’s work as an train in radical perspective—zooming in on the molecular scale of life, solely to then leap outward throughout galaxies and speculative realities that transcend human intelligence. This enlargement of consciousness, from the infinitesimal to the infinite, anchors his newest physique of labor, now on view in “If a chook’s nest is nature, what’s a home?” at Almine Rech New York. Right here, time and house collapse into dense, layered ecosystems the place the previous, current and way forward for humankind unfold concurrently throughout a stage that veers between dystopian and utopian chance.
Constructed from pictures clipped from print media and embedded in epoxy between stacked sheets of laminated glass, Yellin’s intricately choreographed scenes replicate the fluidity of existence and the relativity of human time. They recommend an entangled continuity of forces, beings and supplies at a planetary scale. Humanoid figures carry out recognizable gestures—laboring for survival or ego—whereas the whole lot surrounding them pulses, germinates and evolves, propelled by the entropic drive of nature itself. These tableaux function in line with a logic way more expansive than ours, aligned with rhythms past the human grasp and attuned to the deeper temporalities of the universe.
“I feel it comes right down to how a lot worth we place on our species, in comparison with the tens of millions of years of time, the numerous species that got here earlier than us, and all of the potential types of life that may exist in distant photo voltaic techniques we’ve but to find,” Yellin tells Observer as we stroll by way of the present. “It’s in regards to the skill to zoom method out—to think about not simply eight billion people, however eight billion suns, and a universe so huge we are able to barely know it. I like this type of psychological train. You’re encouraging a mind-set that strikes between scales, zooming in on human intelligence after which zooming farther and farther out, past it.”
Yellin’s work begins with visions and hallucinations, but stays deeply rooted in lived expertise and the huge reservoir of information and tradition that humanity has amassed over centuries of evolution. A lot of it, he explains, stems from nature and a persistent, curious commentary of pure phenomena. “I’m all the time observing, all the time wanting, whether or not it’s at geology or artwork historical past,” he says. “I spend numerous time tweaking, learning, attempting to assimilate the whole lot I’m experiencing and seeing into the work. It’s virtually as if the world itself is the archive, and I’m shifting by way of it, accumulating all of the issues that form one’s existence.”
On this sense, his apply turns into an obsessive, virtually compulsive try and archive and map the infinite nature of actuality by way of the filter of consciousness—a quest to render that complexity seen and materials, to rejoice its multiplicity, richness and irreducible intricacy. Yellin is engaged in a steady effort to make sense of broader, cosmic and infrequently unsettling truths. “It’s about the way you break aside all of the mounted elements and start to see them as an orchestra, a fancy composition of tens of millions of distinct components. Typically, these particular person parts get shadowed by the perceived entire, obscured by the phantasm of unity.”
Notably, what would possibly at first appear to be an intuitive plunge into the tides of non-public and collective unconscious is, actually, mediated by way of a meticulously premeditated staging of speculative futures that Yellin first sketches and designs prematurely. As he explains, the collectible works at the moment on view on the gallery, given their contained scale, truly perform for him extra as maquettes for potential large-scale, immersive environments.
From this attitude, his Pioneer Works house may be understood as essentially the most bold realization of Yellin’s imaginative and prescient: a dwelling laboratory the place imagined futures and artistic regeneration turn into dynamic forces inside an area that fuses disciplines, permitting divergent types of data and creativeness to collide and coalesce.
What’s significantly putting is the digital aura that begins to emanate from these intensely analog, bodily crafted maquettes. The impact arises from the saturation of shade in every component and, above all, from the visible suspension of three-dimensional varieties inside what seems to be a liquid chamber that viewers encounter at a take away, separated by a clear display. The result’s a delicate perceptual dissonance: one thing totally handcrafted begins to really feel like a simulation, unsettling the boundary between tactile actuality and digital phantasm, and complicating our relationship to this fictive but uncannily speculative type of storytelling.
“It’s fascinating as a result of it’s essentially the most analog factor—it’s simply paint, paper, collage, discovered imagery. It has roots in Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, and people early collage traditions which might be so deeply materials, so tactile,” he says. “And but, right here we’re within the 12 months 2025, changing into an more and more digital species. So the query is, how do you navigate—and even resist being caught—between these two worlds?”
Drawing from Einstein’s concept of relativity, philosophical notions of changing into and Jungian concepts of the collective unconscious, Yellin’s sculptural narrations assert that actuality is not linear or singular, however relative, entangled and fluid—not solely in bodily phrases but additionally by way of its digital double, an inherently mutable dimension. Inside these capsules, the whole lot converges in the potential for simultaneity—worlds the place the primordial previous, the saturated current and a cosmically speculative future are compressed right into a single spatial continuum.
This imaginative and prescient finds its most vivid expression in The Consequential Nature of the Simultaneous (2025), tucked into the gallery’s again room—a hallucinatory but incisive continuum in collapse, the place the epochs of civilization and planetary evolution converge. On this speculative tableau, an historical Etruscan scene is mirrored in opposition to a chaotic cluster of humanoid figures carrying virtual-reality headsets, bumbling round NASA spacecraft and a particle accelerator. Many are already clambering onto a rocket, as if in determined search of an escape route from the tangled loop of evolution, simulation and reminiscence that defines human earthly existence.
On the identical time, all of Yellin’s sculptural dioramas appear to undermine any lingering phantasm of human supremacy. The human presence is rendered minuscule—microscopic figures, absorbed in mundane preoccupations, dwarfed by the ecosystems they inhabit. For Yellin, this act of speculative world-building turns into a method of imagining extra harmonious ecologies, the place nature emerges as an expansive, ever-evolving power that can proceed its course no matter human ambitions for management or permanence.
From these reflections arises the title “If a chook’s nest is nature, what’s a home?”—a query that gestures towards the intricate entanglement of simultaneous modes of existential structure, enacted by totally different species of their shared drive to endure. Yellin’s imaginative and prescient is neither fatalistic nor deterministic; fairly, it acknowledges and embraces the concept all issues take part in a broader cyclical and interconnected order—one which surpasses the destiny of any particular person species.
All figures are suspended inside an imaginative physique of water, simulated by way of layered sheets of epoxy that, at moments, cascade like a waterfall, suggesting an unstoppable rush of transformation and evolution. “Our bodies of water, falling water, the dynamics of fluid motion—these are components I return to time and again,” explains Yellin. “They converse to transformation, to transmutation, to states of changing into and dissolving. There’s one thing in that fixed movement that resonates with the themes I’m drawn to.”
Trapped inside this ceaseless present of water and matter, the humanoids of The Behavior of Nature (Research 2), additionally from 2025, uncover a brand new chance within the inversion of their world, that of totally surrendering their minor existence and collaborating within the movement of particles, energies and natural substances. A single-act drama, suspended in time and epoxy, turns into a device to destabilize notion and an invite to radically shift one’s viewpoint and reexamine what we settle for as mounted, particularly within the shadow of an impending ecological collapse.
Hanging on the wall, work and collages like Crack Portray 1 (2025) current relics and residues of previous and current civilizations as they tumble into fractured rips within the cloth of actuality—slipping towards an abyss, a collective nothingness or everythingness, a black gap of potential or annihilation. In the meantime, the geological lifetime of surrounding mineral and rock formations continues undisturbed, detached and cyclical, way more attuned to the cosmic intelligence of galaxies and stars. Aeological time stands in stark distinction to human time, which we measure in years, generations or centuries. As 18th-century geologist James Hutton noticed, the Earth has “no vestige of a starting, no prospect of an finish.” The whole lot strikes in round movement, as in Seed 7 (2025), sustained by a continuing means of energetic regeneration: a closed loop of changing into, dissolving and changing into once more.
Yellin’s work is an ongoing inquiry into questions which might be basically unanswerable—an invite to tune into different types of intelligence whereas acknowledging the constraints of our senses and our minds when confronted with the vastness of cosmic reality.
Nonetheless, he believes within the energy of the psychedelic to push notion previous its routine edges, drawing us nearer to these elusive truths. “I feel it’s a constructive factor for society to be able to shifting the way in which it perceives itself. If you happen to can alter the collective thoughts’s notion by way of totally different modalities, then hopefully that opens up new methods of considering and being,” he displays, noting that as we develop extra technologically dependent, it turns into more and more pressing to re-center shared sources like air and water which might be as very important as they’re sacred. “The hope is that by way of expanded notion, we start to worth what sustains us, not simply what connects us digitally.”
“It’s virtually like mapping states of consciousness,” he provides, “as when you’re attempting to freeze these in any other case fluid, shifting experiences—moments of illumination on the crossroads of previous, current and future—arrest them simply lengthy sufficient to allow them to be seen, felt and contemplated.”
Dustin Yellin’s “If a chook’s nest is nature, what’s a home?” is on view at Almine Rech by way of August 1, 2025.
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