Monthly Statement:
March 2006
This past month I obtained dust by surprise and through subversive tactics.

This first clump I gathered was H-U-G-E as far as dust bunnies go. It caught me by complete surprise and I am still trying to figure out where this guy came from. While jogging on a beautiful, sunny evening in Tucson I came across a gigantic, colossus clump of dust the size of a human forearm! In complete disbelief, jogging in place, I investigated the anonymous accumulate closer and found myself looking around the area in hopes of finding a clue as to how this thing had settled along the curb. Mystified, I jogged on home and came back in my car with a plastic bag and camera. To give one a real sense of it's massive scale I added my wallet to the photograph. Wow. I picked up the accumulate with a paper towel as I had no idea of the where and how of this dust and drove home drawing a mental map of the nearest the Laundromats thinking it must be clothes dryer refuse. The closest I came up with was a dry cleaners and that is a good six blocks from the location. I'm just not sure at this point.

The second dust bunny I gathered is a collection of little dust bunnies from the Field Museum in Chicago. After visiting the Native American collection and meeting mummies in the basement I was beholding the replica cast of Sue in the main lobby of the museum when I noticed quite a crop of dust circumscribing her on the floor. Sue is the largest and most complete T-Rex fossil in the world. Naturally, such an item had a guardrail for protection from the masses of human spectators and it was between the bars of the guardrail that I stretched through and gathered this dust. Luckily, the museum was nearly closed and this activity went largely unnoticed. Made from the shuffling feet of human wonderment and the shifting weight of thinking eyes, this dust was literally found in the space between prehistory and the present. I was without a camera at the museum so I bought a postcard of Sue in the museum gift shop.

Process: I plan to acquire dust in two ways. Initially, I will ask for permission to sweep a chosen site and document the process. If permission is not granted or if I find myself in a place that seems to be an interesting opportunity for gathering dust, I will then obtain my accumulate in a covert fashion. This means I will inconspicuously search for dust clumps on the spot and document the site, rather than the process.

I will be gathering dust from two different places a month as my contribution to the Accumulation Project. From each bag of dust I obtain I’ll manipulate the dust bunny into different shapes and make a series of photograms on cyanotype paper. As the dust bunny assumes this new pictorial form, it takes of the appearance of a cloud in a deep blue sky and subtly forms a connection between a nuisance remainder of human existence and the ephemeral behavior of the weather overhead. Each series of “clouds” will be placed into a book that I’ve assembled specifically for that place.

Contact: sekondsight@yahoo.com