Herman Kolgen’s series Dust Restriction (2014) includes two digital editions that explore changes in the state of matter. Dust Restriction is derived from a larger body of work titled Dust which includes performances and installations featuring dust accumulations - allowing the viewer to perceive and hear dust on immense scale.
Dust is inspired by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s collaboration Elevage de Poussiere (Dust Breeding, 1920), where Man Ray photographed Duchamp’s iconic work The Large Glass (1915-1923) after it had collected one year’s worth of dust while Duchamp was in New York. In Dust, Kolgen references both aesthetic and process underlying Duchamp’s - and by extension Man Ray’s - work.
At the edge of the imperceptible, pigments are suspended around a magnetic field. Random fibrous networks take shape and then form composite objects, hypnotic in their complexity. Sound particles paired with luminous aggregates exist on a scale that cancels out all points of reference. Here, at the turning point between the invisible and the visible, the video surface becomes a veritable accumulation of microscopic landscapes.
Herman Kolgen lives and works in Montreal, Canada.
