Dustin Yellin
If a bird’s nest is nature, what is a house?
Jun 26 — Aug 1, 2025 | New York, Tribeca

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Almine Rech New York, Tribeca is pleased to present ‘If a bird’s nest is nature, what is a house?’, Dustin Yellin’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from June 26 to August 1, 2025.

I was doomscrolling social media late one night—call it a ritual, call it a failure of will—when I landed on a TikTok clip of astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi chatting with Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Paul Mecurio. In the video, Oluseyi explains the Andromeda paradox with casual brilliance: Imagine you’re sitting still in a chair and someone runs past you—at the precise moment you cross paths, you both look up at the Andromeda galaxy. Due to the relativity of simultaneity and the immense distance of Andromeda, you each perceive the galaxy as it existed on entirely different days, despite occupying nearly the same space and time. In a universe governed by Einstein’s theory of special relativity, time is elastic, contingent, dependent on motion and perspective. There is no singular “now.” The further you stretch across space, the more the concept begins to unravel.

As I tried to make sense of this cosmic and unsettling truth, I was reminded of Dustin Yellin’s work—specifically Politics of Eternity (2020), a 10,000-pound work composed of seven laminated glass panels that unfold as a sweeping triptych of civilization’s mythic past, industrial present, and speculative future. Structured in mirrored acts, the piece moves from an ancient ritual scene to a futuristic orbital gathering, with a central tableau depicting the relentless march of modernity across a sea of tall ships and supertankers. As with much of Yellin’s practice, it resists chronology in favor of simultaneity, layering fragments of imagery and time into a fragile but vivid whole.

Yellin’s latest large-scale sculpture, The Consequential Nature of the Simultaneous (2025)—which premieres in ‘If a bird’s nest is nature, what is a house?’, his first solo exhibition with Almine Rech—continues and deepens this inquiry. Also structured around a mirrored narrative, the work juxtaposes a vision of alien astronauts assembling around a NASA spacecraft and a particle accelerator with a chaotic, speculative depiction of an ancient Etruscan scene. Suspended in layers of glass, these two poles suggest a continuity between ancient cosmology and scientific futurism, collapse and discovery. The sculpture reads as a time-bridge—an architectural container for converging belief systems, cultural ruins, and space-age imaginaries. It captures Yellin’s signature method of embedding found materials, painted gestures, and cultural detritus into a stratified structure that invites contemplation of what it means to exist—simultaneously—across epochs.

— Terence Trouillot, Senior Editor at frieze.