DUST
Denis Beaubois, Mauritius/Australia No Longer Adrift (2013, updated 2023)
Herman Kolgen, Canada Dust Surface (2010)
Michael Saup, Germany Dust VR (2018 – 2023)
June 3 – August 13, 2023
Extended to August 20
Opening Reception
Saturday, June 3
3pm-4:30pm
“Dust does not stay outside us but is a narrative that enters us: dust has access in every breath inhaled, and it entangles with our tissue….” Jussi Parikka
Search and you will find dust woven through the universe; swept up, dispersed and deposited across the globe; collecting in every corner of our lives. All of humanity lives on a fragment of cosmic dust…and we are dust. Visible, invisible, meaningful, reviled; dust has been exploited by artists as material, subject, ontology and landscape. Full of properties, concepts and relationships, and the potential to convey ideas, dust has been handed down to us through histories and words, and now interpreted through data collection, complex technologies, moving images and sound. This exhibition brings together three award-winning artists who have produced extraordinary, populated landscapes, each underscored with an aggregation of sound.
The idea of dust has long captivated artists who often position it as an inevitable consequence of time. Working technologies and sound are used in each of these installations to foreground the expanded and hidden dimensions of dust and its relationship to landscape. Each gives us brilliant, new ways of thinking about the meaning of landscape and the human dimensions of dust. Denis Beaubois considers the meaning of dust he has collected from airport landscapes (geographies of nowhere) and has then anatomized. Michael Saup makes us suddenly aware of the hidden scourge of dust generated and acted upon by natural phenomena and human activity, then revealed to us through VR and composed sound. Herman Kolgen creates an orphic descent from a world of light and life to a dark world of muffled dust, imagined through video microscopy and composed sound.
Through imaging technologies and sound, this exhibition exposes us to dust landscape narratives and considers how it affects our communities and life on earth. To echo Jussi Parikka; ‘The twenty-first century is the century of dust.”
For more information visit: https://www.newmediagallery.ca