Dustin Yellin's glass sculptures use magazine clippings to form human-like shapes. Photo by David Deng.
Contemporary works of art—paintings, sculptures, photography, textiles, and multimedia works—populate the pages of Dwell, as art is just as important to many people's lives as well-crafted chairs and tables. But one table has turned, so to speak. Pages of Dwell now populate works of contemporary art.
Brooklyn-based artist Dustin Yellin produces three-dimensional collages made of photographic images excised from magazines, then strategically arranged and encased in layers of thick glass, resulting in picture-rich constellations frozen within transparent forms. When I visited Yellin's studio recently, I noticed a three-person team, who work exclusively in "the cutting room," taking their X-Acto knifes to several issues of Dwell stacked all around them.
"Dwell, oh yeah. That's a great magazine," Yellin told me, when I noted his sources. He then took me around back, to the wood shop, where these sandwiched-glass forms, some as large as twelve tons, are crated for shipment around the world. This one is "Dwell heavy," he quipped, pointing to "City VIII", a piece consisting of a tornado-like array of architectural structures such as ascending stairs, long wood panelling, and glass wall facades, thrusting in every direction.
Yellin is also the founder of Pioneer Works, a non-profit institute in Red Hook, still being fabricated within a Civil War-era warehouse dedicated to art and innovation of all kinds (a science lab on the third floor sits next to an artist studio, which is adjacent to his likewise-massive studio). He is one ambitious artist, for sure. And now, it seems, an interior architect.
