Dustin Yellin

Vito Schnabel Presents: Osiris On The Table London

February 17 - March 15, 2011

Osiris on the Table
Dustin Yellin
Presented by Vito Schnabel and 20 Hoxton Square Projects
20 Hoxton Square, London, UK, N1 6NT.
February 17 – March 12

Dustin Yellin's first show in London, Osiris on the Table, stitches a fragmented world together in uncanny visions, at once static and vibrating across layers of glass. The works accordion before the eye, turning flat in moments and spilling out in others. Those familiar photographic pieces draw us into whirlpool dreamscapes and surreal mythology; a spaceship becomes a glacier, a fish a vein. Here, images culled from history and memory are the fragments of Osiris. Yellin resuscitates them, giving them new meanings, new lives. Collected photographs, utilitarian records of seen life, are reanimated through Yellin's dynamic approach to collage, painting and ultimately sculpture.

A pair of six foot sculptures crown the show. Til Human Voices Wake Us, a dizzying seascape, shows civilization both engulfed by and rising up from the depths of a frozen ocean. The title captures a moment between redemption and drowning, between dream and death. Remnants from the world of man—a microscope, severed statuary—recede half-sunk into the merciless horizon, and still the waves heave and crash as though about to break their transparent fetters. In its sister piece, a figure, the titular Osiris on the Table, appears like some primordial iceman, preserved from a time outside of time, ready to step out from his glass coffin and into the world. A euphony of organic and inorganic material—vines, insects, waves, flames—become a body beyond the dreams of Arcimboldo. Consummate, silent, and entombed, a spume of oil escapes from his open mouth.