The Brooklyn Rail

Dustin Yellin (b. 1975, Los Angeles) is a New York-based artist known for his immersive “frozen cinema,” complex, layered sculptures made by embedding images, objects, and gestures within sheets of laminated glass. These works act as portals into imagined ecosystems, collapsing epochs, species, and cultural references into stratified tableaux that meditate on time, consciousness, and the entanglement between nature and technology. Drawing from a vast archive of visual languages, Yellin’s practice refuses hierarchy or fixed interpretation, instead inviting viewers into open-ended experiences shaped by collision and accumulation.

In conversation around his debut solo exhibition at Almine Rech, Yellin describes his work as an inquiry into the unresolvable. Rather than offering answers, he seeks to build “fields” of experience, conceptual environments where ambiguity and multiplicity generate meaning. Influenced by everything from mycelial networks and meteorites to Andrei Tarkovsky and cabinets of curiosity, his practice moves fluidly between disciplines and materials, reflecting on the shifting boundaries between the natural and the constructed, the ancient and the speculative.

Ginevra de Blasio (Rail): I would like to begin with the title of your exhibition at Almine Rech in New York: If a bird’s nest is nature, what is a house? I found it particularly compelling, especially in light of how the notion of “home” feels increasingly fluid and precarious in our contemporary moment. Could you speak about the origins of this title and how it relates to the broader conceptual framework of the show?

Dustin Yellin: I enjoy thinking about questions that are a little bit unanswerable—what is a house? Is it natural? Is it artificial? Is it constructed by the mind? Or is it constructed by physical elements that we collect and make? I was trying to poke at this idea of mutation that the species is potentially in. Personally, I think of the home as billions of suns, and all of this that we are and have the faculty to perceive. Often in my Luddite-ness, I’m craving these natural phenomena to spend my time in, and I’m also thinking a lot about the idea of artificial intelligence, which is so much at the center of our cortex right now. Everywhere I go, there seems to be discourse about our intelligence that is artificial, yet we natural beings created it. This home that I’m in is constructed out of artificial materials and natural materials. I just don’t understand where that line is anymore, or if there is a line there. Natural intelligence is something I’ve thought about a lot. What are natural intelligences? Mycelial networks are natural intelligence, but our networks of circuits are not natural. I don’t have answers for any of this, but it’s something that I’m trying to understand. This cellphone seems completely unnatural to me, and yet I’m married to it. I’m using it right now to talk to you. It’s become this wonderfully terrible parasite of my brain.

Rail: Of everyone’s brain. Don’t worry. [Laughter]

Yellin: No, but it’s real. The amount of time I’m on it is significant, because I’m doing searches on the internet. I’m jumping from editing a film that I’m working on to reading a W. H. Auden poem or a Frank O’Hara poem, and then jumping to read a news article, and then jumping to share a New Yorker article, and then jumping to video something. It’s become part of my process, and soon that process, that appendage, will be inside me—not that I’m looking to do that, but it seems that that’s where our species is headed. And so the home is an extension of that “systemness-ness” of us. As for a bird’s nest, I went to Papua New Guinea, and I watched the bowerbirds do their crazy dances, and I often think about that insane sci-fi, natural system that I was experiencing. And now, here we are in this artificial matrix, and I just don’t know where those things start and stop. And I think that’s what the question tries to tease out.

Rail: How do you think that your work reflects on this question?

Yellin: Well, I use many, many materials. I find myself to be medium agnostic. I think that reality is the one medium to lean into, if you will. And so the paintings, for instance, are these portals, or these rips in the space-time continuum that seem to have sucked up all of the debris of the consciousness that is shared by species. They can be gorillas and insects and Shang dynasty bronzes and Pieter Bruegel the Elder paintings and Egyptian Isis sculptures and caves within caves that are enveloping human history.

So I’m playing with all these invented constructs of the world, and trying to understand what is natural. For example, is this Valdivian stone hippo-creature that’s around 3,000–4,000 years old artificial or natural? A human carved it. The animal is probably based on a real animal, but it looks pretty mythological and invented to me. And I’m trying to understand if that is part of nature or not.

And so I guess this idea is in all of the works, whether the sculptures, like one of the sculptures in the exhibition, Arcadia to Empire (2025), is a stone bridge that’s been taken over by nature. And an old Chinese artifact being—sort of Gulliver’s Travels—pulled across the bridge. I’m trying to think through the question: is nature a technology? That stone bridge is made of rocks, and rocks are natural. AI is made of rocks in some ways—we’re dealing with rare earth minerals and whatnot—so the way we power all of these devices, I believe, is natural, even though the objects may feel incredibly unnatural. Maybe that’s because we’re still animals, but now we are animals becoming machines. And that is a very uncomfortable feeling.

Rail: I often think of your works as portals—they really do feel like openings into alternate realities. Would you say these figures are imagined taxonomies, almost like invented specimens? Or are they more grounded in lived experience? I’m curious whether you’re drawing from the visual languages of the many cultures you collect and surround yourself with. Where do you see your work sitting in relation to exploration versus classification?

Yellin: Exploration. When I was younger, I was certainly more taxonomical. Now it’s more about exploring, maybe not what a single object represents, but when you put two objects next to each other, and a third relationship is created—what is that third thing? For example, if I put a South American ceramic next to a Byzantine stone sculpture, I start to understand the relationship. Or if I take a Cycladic Kilia “Stargazer,” like the one Constantin Brâncuși was looking at for his faces, and I put it next to a Vinča ceramic from around the same period, from the Balkans, I see the similarities between these faces, and they both actually look extraterrestrial—or what we identify as the trope for this extraterrestrial being. Or when I put a Peruvian Moche bronze from two thousand years ago next to a cylinder seal from three thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, or a Moche bronze next to a Northwestern Native American stone mask, I see the way those faces talk to each other. I try to engage those third, fourth, fifth, relationships that happen between objects. I think of them as activations, or experiences that happen within the paintings or the sculptures that I’m making. But instead of just two objects, sometimes it’s one hundred objects or one thousand colliding, the way that we collide with reality to create these experiences.

Rail: Absolutely, and this perfectly aligns with the materiality in your work. I’m thinking of the many layers of glass. There’s a stratification element to it. It’s as if the physical layers of glass mimic a conceptual stratum of meaning. Do you think about this divergence between the metaphysical and the physical?

Yellin: Oh, all the time! [Laughter] I think we can make many analogues. Whether it’s archeological strata time, or the way we edit with screens, or with tracks of music. There’s a piece in the show called The Consequential Nature of the Simultaneous (2025). If a layer’s here, and a layer’s there, and then there and here—they’re all existing simultaneously. So how many of them are you conscious of at any single point? This is something I like to play with. It’s almost like a psychedelic experience; it’s not about what you’re seeing, it’s about how you’re seeing, and that “how” changes depending on your state of mind.

Rail: Your work is like an installation in a way, because there’s a very strong physical element to it. You need to engage with the piece, similarly to how Bernini envisioned his sculptures as complete works of art, not to be just looked at, but to be walked around.

Yellin: Completely. I mean, if you’ve never been to the Redwoods, you’re never going to be able to see that tree that’s lived through the Crusades and the Renaissance without actually going and walking around it.

Rail: In an interview I was reading, your compositions are described as “micro-Internets.” I was wondering if you could expand on this. What does the metaphor encompass? Is it a reflection of the data-saturated environment we live in now?

Yellin: These shelves behind me, they could be a micro-internet of objects. Just like in my work, if you put a Roman head next to a ceramic South American head from a culture from two thousand years ago, next to an Iranian bronze, next to a Japanese bronze that’s next to a Viking ceramic next to an Indian bronze—those are some of the micro-internets that happen within the work. But in my sculptures it really explodes out because it could include a can of Mountain Dew next to a Goodyear tire, which is next to a wagon wheel, which is next to a button, which is next to a diamond, which is next to a chair, and so on and so forth. When I think of micro-internets, that’s what I think of.

Rail: You’re drawing references to an incredible collection of artifacts and histories from so many different cultures. What is your take on the endless number of images that the internet allows us access to?

Yellin: That’s a good question. I think that, on one hand, it’s wonderful, because maybe there’s a ten-year-old in Texas who is never going to go to Benin. And so maybe this is a way for them to experience that. But then are they just experiencing an apparition of it? How does one’s inner experience of actually going someplace in person compare with digitally reproducing that experience?

I mean, right now we’re talking about some physical objects, but then I’m quickly on the internet looking at a Bosch painting, or a Bruegel painting, or I’m using the internet to explore, and now AI is scraping the entire internet and even creating its own sort of internets of synthetic data to mine. I think there’s analogs there in the way we, as human computers, process all of the data around us and the way that machine learning does. I feel like these are two comets going through space, getting closer and closer together.

Rail: Do you think that your engagement with certain objects is very different in the digital sphere? I mean, compared to having the physical object in front of you?

Yellin: Absolutely. I often speak about how obsessed I am with meteorites. I have a bunch of beautiful meteorites, a piece of the moon, and a piece of Mars, and mystical minerals—a piece of malachite, and torbernite. And then here I have the most uninteresting of all my rocks, visually. I mean, you look at this, and it looks like a piece of coal, but it is actually older than the Earth, and parts of it are older than the sun. I’m always thinking about that. I’m obsessed with this idea that the building blocks for life were ubiquitous to the asteroid belt before the Earth even came together. When I hold that thing in my hand, I’m going back five billion years. If I read about Allende or a Murchison meteorite on the internet, it’s different than holding something that has lived through epics.

Rail: So would you say that these objects retain an aura or an energy?

Yellin: Of course. I mean, that’s why I like rocks so much. That’s why I spend days in empty river beds holding rocks—to think about that. I mean, some of those rocks are only thirty, forty, fifty thousand years old, and some of them are three, four, five million years old, and some of them are fifty, sixty million years old, and some of them are four billion years old.

Rail: You once described Pioneer Works—the cultural center you founded—as a “social sculpture,” emphasizing that there’s no real separation between the institution and your studio practice. I know these things evolve over time, so I’m curious—does that still feel accurate to you today?

Yellin: It’s both at the same time: yes, there’s a separation, and no, there isn’t a separation. [Laughter] There’s a team at Pioneer Works that’s completely separate from the folks I work with in the studio. So mechanically, it’s completely separate. The idea is that I can be hit by a car and Pioneer Works thrives. My obsolescence is a success, if you will. And I’ve spent a lot of years engineering it for that. But as I said, two things can be true at the same time. It is its own institution, and needs to function completely independently of any individual, but as the person who made it and brought it into the world—I feel really attached to it. It is part of my practice. I think about it every day, and I try to give love to it in any which way I can. Does that make sense?

Rail: Yes, absolutely. So can you talk a little more about how one aspect influences another? I mean, does Pioneer Works ever have a visible or tangible influence in your work?

Yellin: Oh, one hundred percent. I walk in the door there and I get confronted. It’s the school I never had. If it’s the Living School that is around on Wednesday, I’ll go there to learn about rivers from an author I love. And on Friday, I’ll go there to see drawings of an artist I loved who’s no longer with us. You know what I mean? It’s constantly surprising me and teaching me and challenging me and inspiring me and perplexing me—constantly. Everyone I meet and everything I encounter is hitting me as an input, and then I’m outputting. Maybe that output is going into an object, or maybe I’m meeting somebody incredible and connecting them with other people they can work with, and thrive.

Rail: Did formal collaborations ever emerge with the residents?

Yellin: Oh yeah, of course. So many that I wouldn’t even know how to track them. But we don’t prescribe that as much as just let that happen. We create, you know? It’s like if you have soil and some good seeds, and you add fertilizer, give it some water, and you have some sunshine—just like that, you have a garden.

Rail: This is particularly interesting in relation to your studio practice, which functions more like a workshop—an ancient model, with many artists working collectively. What is your take on the collective studio model today? And how do you feel about the idea of the artist’s aura in such a context? I’m thinking of how your hand might not physically touch every work, but it remains in the conceptual area.

Yellin: Yeah, I think it’s more about the idea. It’s the idea that’s coming through. And if the idea is true to the vision, and creating the experience for the person who encounters it, that’s all one can do. As long as I’m getting outside my head, and the ideas that I’m trying to ignite into the consciousness of others start to burn, then it’s working. I love working collaboratively in the studio. I really identify more as a filmmaker, because I have the idea, a drawing or script, if you will, and I have actors, and those actors are my assistants, and they have the script. They know exactly where we’re going, because the vision is in the form of words or drawings or both. There’s a real vision for every work. But within that work, I encourage my assistants to say, try, and do things. I don’t want it to be like a Sol LeWitt paint by number.

I have someone in the studio who’s my lead, and he’s an incredible artist. He’s been with me, I think, for fifteen years. And there’s a lot of shorthand, telepathy, if you will, that you create with these people. They know, “Oh, Dustin’s going to think that the tree branch is too flat,” or “This boat is going to be weird enough for Dustin.” I encourage experimentation. The longer I work with people who are assisting me in the studio—and I think you get this with actors and directors—the more we kind of know each other’s brain. It’s just like how the right director can help inspire an insane performance out of an actor. There’s trust there. So what’s important to me is that the idea and the experience have the metaphysical meeting point.

Rail: You often draw parallels to cinema, which I find fascinating, especially given the strong cinematic quality of your work. It feels like a miniature world—almost as if some kind of liquid has been used to suspend and freeze time. Could you speak more about how film influences your thinking, both structurally and visually?

Yellin: Exactly. I call it “frozen cinema.” I think now I’m making moving cinema. I think that, like frozen cinema, often you go through the world—and I’m sure you’ve had the experience where you’re driving down a road in Italy, and you like the way the light looks across a stone building, or a certain olive orchard. And you’re like, “Fuck! Look at that. That looks like a still in a film! I don’t think that this is real? That can’t be real, but I’m real, and I’m driving, and this is real.” Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time touched on a lot of that kind of experience.

Rail: How do you see the transition from the frozen cinema to the moving (image)?

Yellin: I’m obsessed right now. I’m editing and working with animation almost every single day lately. Yesterday—really last night—I got an octopus to move the way I wanted it to. And then some things don’t work, and I have to do it over and over and over. For example, an owl that I was working with yesterday wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do, or feeling the way I wanted it to feel, but the octopus was. I like the handmade-ness of these collage paintings that I’m working in, which are super, super analog, and then using some technology to bring them to life, and yet it still feels completely handmade, completely true to what I made, but now it’s animated. It’s getting me extraordinarily excited.

Rail: Speaking of collage, your work has so many references. I’m sure you look at Robert Rauschenberg—

Yellin: And Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp and Louise Bourgeois. I mean, the amount of references is crazy. When I think of who inspired me, I’m like, “Holy fuck, five thousand years of art history inspires me.” It could be the most obvious thing in the world, like The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500), and then The Thing, or a drawing that some fucking twenty-five-year-old kid who’s in fucking Bushwick that no one’s ever heard of, and like, everything in between, right? I mean have you been to Egypt? Have you been to Jordan? Have you been to Papua New Guinea? Have you been to fucking Kyoto? And look, just the amount of time I could spend with a nineteenth-century woodblock, Hiroshige and Hokusai. I guess this gets back to micro-internets, because it’s just endless. That keeps me optimistic.

Rail: It’s a bit like when someone asks, “Who’s your favorite artist?” or “What’s your favorite painting?”—when you’re operating in these realms, those questions become almost impossible to answer. That said, I’m particularly interested in the iconographic elements of your work, especially given its figurative nature. Is this something you consciously think about? Could it be seen as a kind of contemporary iconography? I’m curious whether these symbols and mash-ups carry specific meanings for you, or if you’re more interested in creating an open-ended narrative?

Yellin: I’m trying to create an experience, and through experiences, we make meaning. I’m always thinking about how we can subvert and massage and create and mold different modalities for meaning-making through different experiences.

Rail: So, what do you think of Surrealism, for example? What you’re doing has certain parallels.

Yellin: You know, I don’t love to pin things down so directly. Yes, I connect deeply to Surrealism, but I also connect deeply to Japanese woodblock and sixteenth-century painting and four-thousand-year-old stone carvings. I don’t have a hierarchical framework.

Rail: Can you tell us more about the altar-wunderkammer located in the entrance of your studio? It’s like a constellation of objects, so hard to even decipher. I was wondering if you were thinking about it as a cabinet of curiosities? If you were thinking about it as a temple? As an ecosystem?

Yellin: I call it “altar-sculpture.” And I want to make more altar-sculptures. They’re never finished because you’re constantly moving them around. And yeah, they’re all the things you just said. They’re a place for me to deal with the cabinet of curiosity. But I am always zooming out. So I obviously completely and utterly identify with the idea of the cabinet of curiosity. I mean live in one, but I think that the ultimate cabinet of curiosity is like the skull, or the Earth. How do you bash the skull against the Earth to unlock the true cabinet of curiosity?

Rail: Interesting. So is the sculpture in your studio ever finished? If it’s always changing, I assume it’s never complete.

Yellin: It’s never ending. Because you walk by it, and you move something, you change something, maybe you add something.

Rail: Is everyone allowed to change it?

Yellin: It’s not that communal of a piece, it’s more something I’m working on. That being said, I’m pretty easy. So if you walked in the studio and you asked, “Can I put this thing here?” that might work.

Rail: If it’s a special stone. Maybe?

Yellin: I mean, stones usually are a big yes! But if you’re like, can I put this can of tuna there, I might say no.

Rail: I wanted to ask about the works that are not on view in the current show—those earlier, more conceptual pieces made from found materials that still live in your studio. Do you find yourself returning to that language? Has it continued to inform your more recent work, or do you see it as part of a different chapter in your practice?

Yellin: I think they definitely inform each other. And I think you’re referring to these things that I’ve called “ant farms” or “landfills of human time.” I started them before the pandemic. I’ve only done a handful, but that’s like a thread I would like to keep pulling. I have an idea for an installation where you would walk through them, and they’re dealing with different human information systems. So you might have a wall of eight tracks and a wall of hard drives and a wall of found paintings and different ways that humans deal with information systems.

Rail: This also relates to the sustainability factor in your work. Do you think that this commentary on sustainability is something that is more visible in these older works or in your current sculptures?

Yellin: It comes out in both, but it comes out in different ways. Maybe it comes out more allegorical in the newer sculptures. There’s a new piece I want to show you. It’s outside. It doesn’t have a title yet. Ready?

Rail: Wow, beautiful! So are these found rocks that you assembled?

Yellin: Yeah, I found them on the top of the mountain, and then brought them and put them here, and then I went and found the moss and transplanted it.

Rail: It reminds me of a Japanese garden.

Yellin: It’s exactly inspired by that.

Rail: It’s beautiful, really beautiful. Since we’re in the garden, do you want to speak a little about the sustainability element in your work?

Yellin: Going back to creating experiences, and since my experience of reality is so steeped in natural systems, I think that the sustainability element is intrinsically brought into the works. I think a lot about how to protect natural systems.

Rail: I know your outlook in general is neither positive nor negative. It’s not binary in any way. You have a deep love and respect for natural systems, but you also love technology. So I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit about this kind of neutral state?

Yellin: Well, I try to be like a rock. I try to. I am endlessly optimistic by this mysticism that exists in the sort of infinite space that we inhabit and that we can comprehend. If you think about exploration, it’s like, if you took a teacup out of your kitchen and you put it into the ocean. That teacup represents less than the space that we have explored. So think about how we are living in a state of profound unknowingness and that is exciting. And through all the darkness and all of the death and destruction that our species casts on each other, the amount of unknown is so great, and the time scale is so gigantic, immeasurable, that it keeps me from passing judgment. I’m just in a constant state of desire to experience more of it.

Rail: Your work feels like a visual manifestation of that complexity—a dense mash-up of so many influences. There’s so much happening at once that, as a viewer, it’s hard to tell whether the perspective is critical, celebratory, or something in between. That ambiguity is compelling, and it aligns perfectly with what you’re saying—that you’re not necessarily trying to offer a clear answer.

Yellin: Because the important question is unanswerable. And anyway, I don’t want to give an answer. I don’t even want to tell anyone how to feel or how to experience or how to see. I just want to create a field, if you will, for the experience to happen. And I want to be able to transmit as many of those questions, and as much of the matter that consciousness can touch, into that field. It’s as if you’re building a lens, and all of this information can go through that lens. That is the work.