Dust is a kind of interface – scientific yet mundane. Within the domestic, it becomes a kind of proto-archive, a record of what occurred. For matter that co-exists with us, often invisibly, to be archived and then made visible is also exposing the layers of nuanced information that it may carry within itself.
Bringing a Poem to a Gunfight (Side B) offers hand-collected domestic dust, text and textiles as objects that may hold data revealing how we view labour, matter and identities entangled within domestic as well as public spaces.
Encased in seven custom-made wooden boxes, dust here – now seemingly tamed and obedient by the act of being contained – is presented as objects to be viewed, studied and examined. The addition of a loupe that is provided alongside the boxes provokes the viewer to interact with the adjacent box and its contents up-close. By exposing it to public inspection, it further forces an intimate relationship to be formed between the viewer and the dust that has emerged from someone else’s home but has now been put on a proverbial pedestal. Or is it a scene of crime?
The data held within the boxes can provide clues as to what events may have taken place, the changing seasons, the people involved and their activities. There are grains of rice and lentils pressed against the plexiglass but there are also bits of leaves, bugs and tiny pebbles — traces of who may have visited the artist’s home and what they would have brought in with them, from the outside world. The public sphere, here, enters the domestic and through the project, permeates back into the public realm, thus, bridging the private with the shared common.
Modelled after colonial ethnographic artefacts that are de (re) contextualised from its place of the nativity when brought to a museum/gallery setting, each of these boxes invoke questions about the information or the power that these objects may hold in its new environment. The custom-made light boxes, multiple and visually repetitive in form, take after colonial aesthetics of viewing, meaningful-making and the politics of displaying matters that may have once been private and personal, but are now for anyone to comment upon. But can the same aesthetics be adopted and reclaimed as auto-ethnography? Does it then shift the gaze for the indulgence to also be viewed as critical or does it internalise the same regressive values?
What happens to the object itself (in this case, household dust) when it is removed from its place of nativity and brought into a museum/gallery setting? Does the matter then gain more value or does it lose some of its inherent value to become solely representative and symbolic? Is its identity and the power it may possess neutralised by the act of removing it from its place of origin? But if dust is largely considered a matter of refusal or removal, what purpose may it then hold? Can domestic dust have the capacity to transform its role as a passive observer to become an active actor in presenting narratives?
Each of the seven light boxes have an enclosed (index) drawer that holds within them short epigrams for the ones seeking more information about the material that it holds. Depending on how one may navigate the additional data, these two-sentence poems — letterpress printed on fabric — either add to the knowledge that the dust in the respective box may provide or throw them further into abstraction.
By treating domestic dust as a scientific site of data collection and reporting, this work processes and expands upon the invisible areas where the line between the domestic and the public realm meets, bends and shifts.
