Thursday Salute to Originals: 3-D Glass Collages
As kids, we can all remember making collages at some point in our life – whether it was in a grade school art class or just for fun. We would sit there destroying our parent’s Better Homes and Gardens, Good House Keeping, and Sports Illustrated magazines. Some of us even moved on to create more meticulous, visionary and inspirational collages as we grew older. But they all kind of looked… Well, the same. It didn’t matter whether we used glue and paper or Mod Podge and canvas. So now, we want to introduce you to artist Dustin Yellin.
Yellin is practically a master-collager who put a seriously cool spin on the traditional type of cut-and-paste, letter by letter collage. He creates three-dimensional collages using layers and layers of glass. Each layer is covered in unique and bizarre snip-its from various books, magazines, and other scripts. In some scenarios, he’ll even use acrylic paint on a particular layer. The outcome is one cohesive and dynamic single glass block with animations that appear frozen and suspended. Let’s take a look at some of Yellin’s recent installations:
Ten Parts:
In this installation, Yellin tells an unpleasant story of global destruction through these 10 solid glass bricks. From left to right, the scenes depict humanity falling from mountaintops into an angry sea. And on the far right – humanity appears to be falling off the Earth altogether. In each glass brick, Yellin has strategically placed thousands of cut outs onto the glass layers to create his story.
Psychogeographies:
Yellin refers to these particular 3-D figures as Psychogeographies because they layout a ‘map of the psyche.’ Psychogeography literally refers to an approach to geography that emphasizes playfulness and drifting around urban environments. Using the same method of layered glass and animated cut-outs, he created figures fused with ‘fantasty and imagination.’ These installations took Yellin 6 years to complete.
New York City Ballet:
In 2015, the New York City Ballet commissioned Yellin to create a new series of his figurative collages, Psychogeographies. In this installation, each figure weighs 3,000 pounds and resembles a dancer striking a different pose. Their 3-D bodies are made up once more of cut-outs from books and magazines, seemingly suspended in animation. When describing his artwork, Yellin likes let viewers ‘listen’ to them and hear what the massive see-through blocks have to say for themselves.
This Thursday, we salute Dustin Yellin for being the master of the collage. We appreciate his refreshed approach to an old-time craft by using multiple layers of glass to turn each collage into a 3-D figurative artwork.
Sources: Dustin Yellin, Artsy, This is Colossal, Hi Fructose