⤶

Suspended Silver
2015
Pigment Print

Suspended Silver is a photographic series made from silver particles collected from found film stock debris. Over time, damaged film negatives which had lost some of their light-sensitive silver crystals on which images form and had become part of the dust covering the space in which they were found. By finding and printing these silver particles – the material equivalent of pixels – the composition of information that produced the original photographs is reshaped into opaque remains that bare the physical and formal traces of the original photographs, all the while rendering them remote and cryptic relics. 

The project deploys chemical procedures that synthesize archaeological and narrative strands of information ossified in dust into artifacts. Silver particles were mined and separated from the dust to form the material base for the photographic series. The light-sensitive silver particles that were once the medium on which photographic information was inscribed, are considered inscriptions in their own right and are printed as photographs. 

Collapsing Clouds of Gas and Dust is comprised of artworks that are based on dust. It stems from an understanding of dust as “remains” —as material index of human and non-human activity that is continuously formed and accumulated by and on objects, bodies and spaces. It identifies biological debris in dust and examines the relation between dust and memory, as well as monumentality. The iteration of the project features artworks that deploy chemical procedures in order to synthesize the archaeological and narrative strands of information, ossified in biological debris, into artifacts that become, in their turn, material ciphers waiting to be decoded and recombined. The project proposes the act of memorial—or monument- making, as fundamentally an act of delineating the space of remains to be deemed significant and worthy of preservation or commemoration. Monumentality, in that sense, inheres not in scale per se, but in the space delineated by the dust created over time, thus making the memorial or monument a structure that indicates the locus of the historical and material “weight” that has accumulated—settled—over time.