Psychogeography is the act of exploring an urban environment with an emphasis on curiosity and drifting. Or, more colloquially put, a “toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities.” For the Brooklyn-based artist Dustin Yellin, his toy box is full of everything he finds on the street—flowers, leaves, bugs, and even dead rats, which are then composed into three-dimensional collages and sealed behind resin.

In his most recent series “Psychogeographies,” Yellin uses multiple layers of glass, each covered in detailed imagery, to create a single intricate, three-dimensional collage with a mix of magazine cut-outs and acrylic paint. When pressed to describe what he does, Yellin struggles, but not with a lack of words. Here is an excerpt from a mini-essay “concerning the difficulty of saying something about what I do.”

“Is it a copout to say “the work speaks for itself”?

I feel like it is

But I’m also awful talking about what the work is.

So sometimes I say “it speaks for itself”

But what does that even mean?

However, he does offer some advice:

First and foremost, they’re massive see-through blocks

And that’s one way to read them, listen to them “speaking”

As massive see through blocks.

Another is to listen to what’s inside them

The forms, the clippings, the dead things, the painted things,

Frozen between the layers of glass, what I’ve called

The captured and frozen “dynamism” of culture.

You can follow Dustin Yellin on Facebook or Instagram, or read more about him in this NYT article.

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