Dust and ashes

A new Polygon Gallery exhibition focusing on dust  was sparked by this image, a 1920 photograph by artist Man Ray. It's of a Marcel Duchamp work in progress, a dust-covered sheet of glass. The image has apparently intrigued artists and photographers ever since it appeared in a French journal under the deliberately misleading caption, "View from an aeroplane." Don't ask.

The show features photographs from the last 100 years focusing on the theme of dust. It includes a number of press photos from the American West dust-bowl in the 1930s.

This is what a watch looked like after the Nagasaki  atomic explosion. 

Ex-employees of the Kodak film factory watch it implode. Many are using digital devices to record the moment.

John with his cane, his leg still hurting, and me with my preoccupation with a massive writing project, did not do justice to the Polygon Gallery’s Handful of Dust exhibition. It’s a collection of photographs from the last 100 years focusing on the theme of dust, and highly praised by all kinds of publications, from The Guardian to the Globe & Mail to the local Georgia Straight.

But oh dear.

At the end of a winter filled with extreme-weather stories from everywhere in Canada and illnesses or injuries affecting many of my favourite people, the last thing I really needed was:

Images of dirt storms bearing down on small towns in the American West; the unsettling effects of the Nagasaki atomic bomb blast on a watch and a beer bottle; the implosion of a Kodak film factory, being digitally recorded by ex-employees; a statue of a seated businessman covered in dust and debris after the World Trade Centre attack; a plaster cast of a Mount Vesuvius eruption victim-- an elderly man plumply relaxed on his side. All accompanied by eerie soundtracks and videos I didn’t want to investigate too closely.

We missed the opening-night comments by London, England-based curator David Campany, but the Georgia Straight reported that he said the pervasive tone of the show is one of “dread.”  The gallery website notes the original photograph of dust that prompted all this was published in the same month (in 1922) as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which contained the line: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

So, fear and dread it was. We might have enjoyed it more at the height of summer.

This was the one image that seemed to have sense of hope, possibly because of the golden light. It was called "In deeper," which could mean just about anything.