New Dust Works
11-27 May 2006
Wednesday-Friday 12-6, Saturday 12-4
Reception for the artist: Wednesday 10 May, 6-8.30 pm
Matthew Bown Gallery is pleased to present New Dust Works, an exhibition of dust tables by Judith Frost.
Frost’s interest in dust as a medium goes back to 1992, when as part of the exhibition On Site she made a swept-floor piece, removing the dust from the floor of a derelict industrial building in Bermondsey. She has been making dust tables since 1997.
The dust tables adhere to a single format: a table-top, invariably square or a multiple of a square, is covered with mounds of stone dust (sourced from the beaches and quarries of Portland in Dorset and further afield in Europe).
The formally restrained presentation of such raw materials on a cabinet scale is a kind of domestication of the land art of Robert Smithson and Richard Long. Frost also references arte povera (in 2001 she spent some months on a scholarship in Rome creating works out of marble and tuffa dust). The dust tables embody natural process: the dust is poured or sieved onto the supporting surface, which creates a drip-painting-like tension between the artist’s controlling gesture in the air and the random patterning that occurs on impact.
Frost’s emphasis is not on any kind of intervention in the real landscape but rather on its re-imagination in interior space. By avoiding figurative references beyond that of the hill, mound or mountain, she creates ambiguities of scale. The tables evoke the surfaces of unvisited worlds, or perhaps that unearthly landscape painted by the Douanier Rousseau, in which a sleeping gypsy encounters a lion.
This scalar ambiguity is part of a greater ambivalence. Are we, for example, looking at ‘buildings’ or ‘ruins’? Scarcely buildings, so incipient ruins, perhaps; in which case we are entering the territory explored by the critic Svetlana Boym(1): ‘a labyrinth of ambivalent prepositions – “no longer” and “not yet”, “nevertheless”, “albeit”, and “still”’. Ruins, in Boym’s view, are a congeries of conditional past and future tenses. Such fluidity of temporal horizons is implied by the huge life-span of the stone dust itself.
Since the 9/11 attacks the theme of ruination (and even the grey mineral dust that coated Manhattan) has inserted itself into contemporary art. Frost’s work pre-dates this interest, but her concerns intersect. She emphasises the fragility of states of being. Ruins, in Boym’s phrase, are a place of ‘comforting shadows’, but these shadows may be irretrievably reconfigured at any moment.
(1) All quotations are from http://svetlanaboym.com
Portland Stone, 72 peaks
2006
Portland stone dust on plywood; metal trestles
79 x 39 x 33 in. approx.
Portland Stone, 72 peaks
2006
Portland stone dust on plywood; metal trestles
79 x 39 x 33 in. approx.
Sea Dust, 18 peaks
2006
Sea dust on plywood; metal trestles
79 x 39 x 34 in. approx.
Sea Dust, 18 peaks
2006
Sea dust on plywood; metal trestles
79 x 39 x 34 in. approx.
