Tag Archives: Dust

Further thoughts on dust videos

The dust videos didn’t feel like an end result but do seem to have pointed in a new direction.

Firstly there is a kind of attraction to looking at them, an invitation to reverie.

Something Bachelardian going on here – flame of a candle etc.

Mobile texturolgies – Dubuffet.

There is the link with all the cultural meanings of dust – see the dust papers.  Campany’s history of photography.

Noise – something at the limits of vision.  Real or imaginary.

Dracula appears as dust motes at one point – link to the Gothic.

No sense of scale – emphasises the embodied nature of viewing.

Pure material in motion – a kind of experiment.

Motility – aliveness?

A handful of dust : from the cosmic to the domestic / David Campany.

A handful of dust : from the cosmic to the domestic / David Campany.

Publisher: [London, England] : Mack ; [2015]Description: 153, 71 pages : illustrations (black and white, and colour) ; 24 cm + 1 loose book insert (71 pages).ISBN: 9781910164389; 1910164380.Subject(s): 

 Published on the occasion of the exhibition held at LE BAL, Paris, 16 October 2015 – 17 January 2016.

a Handful of Dust is David Campany’s speculative history of the last century, and a visual journey through some of its unlikeliest imagery. Let’s suppose the modern era begins in October of 1922. A little French avant-garde journal publishes a photograph of a sheet of glass covered in dust. The photographer is Man Ray, the glass is by Marcel Duchamp. At first they called it a view from an aeroplane. Then they called it Dust Breeding. It’s abstract, it’s realist. It’s an artwork, it’s a document. It’s revolting and compelling. Cameras must be kept away from dust but they find it highly photogenic. At the same time, a little English journal publishes TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” And what if dust is really the key to the intervening years? Why do we dislike it? Is it cosmic? We are stardust, after all. Is it domestic? Inevitable and unruly, dust is the enemy of the modern order, its repressed other, its nemesis. But it has a story to tell from the other side. Campany’s connections range far and wide, from aerial reconnaisance and the American dustbowl to Mussolini’s final car journey and the wars in Iraq. a Handful of Dust will accompany Campany’s exhibition of the same name, curated for Le Bal, Paris (16 October 2015 – 17 January 2016), with works by Man Ray, John Divola, Sophie Ristelhueber, Mona Kuhn, Gerhard Richter, Xavier Ribas, Nick Waplington, Jeff Wall and many others, alongside anonymous press photos, postcards, magazine spreads and movies.

img_0005-copy-invertedbPhotographs of hematite powder on a surface, inverted and manipultated in photoshop.  Areas randomly selected displaced and blended.  Could be automated.

A kind of texture field, noise rather than structure.