dustin yellin builds stratified glass sculptures for almine rech’s tribeca gallery

layers of time and space by dustin yellin

Dustin Yellin’s exhibition ‘If a bird’s nest is nature, what is a house?’ is on view at Almine Rech in Tribeca through August 1st, 2025. This marks the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery and brings together five new glass-layered sculptures and a trio of paintings that return to the medium after two decades.

Installed across the gallery’s broad footprint at 361 Broadway, the works occupy the space with a quiet density. Yellin’s signature glass sculptures, composed of stratified layers of found materials and painted gestures, sit upright like sentinels, each embedded with fragments of cultural memory and speculative futures. Rather than offering a linear narrative, the sculptures present themselves as vertical timelines — an architecture of simultaneity, compressed and suspended.

image © Dustin Yellin, courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech | photo: Dan Bradica

material memory on view at almine rech

The centerpiece of Dustin Yellin’s Almine Rech exhibition is titled ‘The Consequential Nature of the Simultaneous’ (2025) and reads as both a sculptural object and a spatial proposition. Inside its stacked glass panels, a mirrored tableau unfolds: on one side, alien astronauts gather around a NASA spacecraft and particle accelerator. On the other, an imagined Etruscan ceremony plays out in rich detail. Together, they form a structural bridge between scientific modernity and ancient ritual. Terence Trouillot, writing on the exhibition, describes the work as ‘an architectural container for converging belief systems, cultural ruins, and space-age imaginaries.’

The artist‘s use of layered glass creates chimera from serial sections. It allows the viewer to move through time as one moves around the work, each shift in angle producing a new composition. The sculptures act as dynamic facades, porous and refractive, housing the artist’s enduring inquiry into the nature of memory, collapse, and continuity.

image © Dustin Yellin, courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech | photo: Dan Bradica

a question of shelter and structure

The title of the exhibition, ‘If a bird’s nest is nature, what is a house?’, functions as a proposition by artist Dustin Yellin. A nest is created through instinct; a house, through design. But both serve as structures of shelter and survival. This line of thinking is echoed in Yellin’s material approach. His sculptures do not mimic architecture but embody its logics: selection, layering, preservation, framing.

In this sense, the works resemble living archives. They do not explain, but accumulate. ‘These are not narrative objects,’ Trouillot writes. ‘They do not explain themselves. Instead, they pose the kinds of questions that recur in Yellin’s larger practice: What survives? What connects? What is the nature of presence across time?‘

image © Dustin Yellin, courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech | photo: Dan Bradica

The works operate on geological timescales. Their materiality of glass, pigment, magazine clippings, and detritus evokes sedimentation, accretion, erosion. Trouillot points to the influence of ‘deep time,’ a concept from geology that renders human life as a fleeting moment in planetary history. Yellin’s sculptures, viewed in this context, function as ‘fossils of thoughts yet to fully form,’ as Trouillot puts it. Their stratified surfaces house what Jacques Derrida might call archival ghosts — gestures suspended in fragile cohesion.

This ethics of scale and memory has long been central to Yellin’s practice, including his work outside the gallery. As founder of Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Yellin has cultivated a multidisciplinary institution where art and science cohabitate. That impulse to build and layer resurfaces here in material form.

Dustin Yellin, Arcadia to Empire, 2025

Three new paintings included in the exhibition extend these themes. Vivid and hallucinatory, they hover between dreamscape and terrain. Rendered in fluorescent tones, the imagined environments resemble alien geology, their surfaces textured with volcanic crusts and luminous sediment. While more atmospheric than the sculptures, they share a spatial rhythm that is thick with ambiguity as they are difficult to date and suggestive of elsewhere.

Yet it is the sculptures that hold the room. They invite sustained attention, and in doing so, create space for reflection. At certain angles, the viewer’s face appears inside the layers, caught between the strata. The works become mirrors, then lenses. ‘If you move close enough,’ Trouillot concludes, ‘you might even see yourself — reflected, refracted, paused — in their layered glass and radiant fragments.’

Dustin Yellin, The Consequential Nature of the Simultaneous, 2025