Dust to Dust: Measures of Time in Sculpture and Film
March 13, 2025
In 1771, German polymath Johann Heinrich Schulze accidentally discovered photography. By dissolving silver bromide particles into a mixture of chalk and acid and exposing it to the sun, he could semipermanently capture shadows. This brilliant, alchemical revelation would birth an entire art form: the medium of capturing still and moving images. This technological magic trick sealed time in a perpetual archive of celluloid.
Fifty million years before these experiments, marble was beginning to form above the tectonic plates of the Mediterranean as crystals became subject to immense heat and pressure. Later discovered in Ancient Roman quarries, now turned to solid stone, it would transform into monuments to power and deification. This cosmological and geological re-materialization of ancient earthly dust and the bromide crystal of photographic film is a metaphorical recrystallization of forgotten memory and the sculpture of reality as we know it.
Belladonna Bianca
Carrara marble
2024
44 x 12 x 7 inches
Analogous to the shifting of these continental plates, cinema and sculpture give form to our unconscious and, thus, our deepest fears and desires, like an earthquake unearthing the remains of a lost civilization. What dances on the screen or in sculpture–the bust of a Roman god or the marble frieze of a Dionysian gathering–recalls this Platonic exchange between reality and fantasy. It also unveils the medium’s intrinsic yet deceptive beauty. In this context, cinema is moving sculpture, and sculpture is the camera obscura of our dreams and lived experiences, all etched in stone.
Narrative and aesthetic theory aside, still and moving pictures and sculptural forms deal primarily with light and illusion to achieve this dance. Shadows render figural gestures and depth, and shadows obscure so that our mind invents the edge of the form, thus furthering our descent into the unknowable and mysterious. A beautiful suspension of disbelief peels everything else away, like a bridge between life and death— then, now, and forever.
Muse
Carrara marble
2022
22 x 18 x 8.5 inches