ART SHOW REVIEW DUSTIN YELLIN $50,000 TWO PARACHUTES AND A CRAB SUIT

RICHARD HELLER GALLERY ART SHOW REVIEW: DUSTIN YELLIN $50,000, TWO PARACHUTES, AND A CRAB'S SUIT

This weekend, during a gallery "crawl", my friends and I stumbled upon an artist with work unlike anything I've ever personally seen. We made our way to Santa Monica Bergamot Station Complex, which I highly recommend if you’re remotely close to the Los Angeles area. We passed by the Richard Heller Gallery and saw what looked like colorful glass squares. This seemed intriguing, so we made our way in. What we walked into was 3D collage translated into a dystopian (wonder)land. The artist is Dustin Yellen and his medium includes glass, acrylic paint, and collage. The show is called Dustin Yellen: $50,000, Two Parachutes, and a Crab’s Suit. This artist takes layers of glass and builds 3D figures through the careful, and I mean obsessively careful, placement of collage pieces and paint strokes on sheets of glass. Once these sheets of glass are placed together, he has a world (or figure) that he has strategically placed together from 2D layers upon 2D layers. I found myself staring at each piece for quite a bit of time because the amount of planning that goes into his pieces is incredible. Every square inch of his 3D collage creates a pattern. The best part of this meticulous planning is that his 3D collages are still fun. My friends and I kept commenting on little pieces or pictures that we remembered from our childhood when we took a very close look, especially when looking at the human body pieces. But the dystopian element of the pieces was very strong; when looking at the fractured human bodies he creates through his collage, it addressed the fractured pieces of ourselves. He takes elements that we all know and love such as cameras, animals, and pop culture icons; then combines them in a very unfamiliar and ruptured way. His art is a stripping and rebuilding of what we know, and since in some cases he rebuilds it in the form of a life size human body, he forces us to look at the deconstruction of our lives face to fragmented face. His show runs until March 29. If you are able, make your way to the Richard Heller Gallery and take your eyes and mind on an artistic trip.