The Work

Art / Tyler Dunston

 

:: Stellar Cloud ::

Pho­tog­ra­phy, 52x26”

From the writer

 

::  Account ::

I began as a painter, cre­at­ing abstrac­tions pri­mar­i­ly with oils and mixed media. As I have expand­ed into oth­er media—photography, sculp­ture, etc.—I have tried to cre­ate abstrac­tions that evoke paint with­out paint. This pho­to is from sequence of pho­tos titled “Stel­lar Clouds,” which is a series of attempts to paint with light using a dig­i­tal cam­era. This process is inspired by the work of Agnès Var­da, who has talked about the for­tu­itous, so-called mis­takes of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, and by the work of Ralph Eugene Meat­yard. Using a point-and-shoot cam­era in low light, I approach abstrac­tion in pho­tog­ra­phy much as I would in paint­ing, but the process is some­what dif­fer­ent. Cre­at­ing these works requires the rapid move­ment of the cam­era across the imag­ined span of com­po­si­tion, mak­ing use of the camera’s inabil­i­ty to hold the light still in dark­ness, the “lim­i­ta­tions” of the tech­nol­o­gy. I have long been inter­est­ed in abstrac­tion and fail­ure, in part inspired by my expe­ri­ence as a writer and by Samuel Beckett’s explo­ration of fail­ure and lan­guage in his work.

 
Tyler Dun­ston is a writer and visu­al artist. His poems can be found in Nar­ra­tive, South­west Review, Nim­rod, The Brook­lyn Review, and oth­er jour­nals. He is the author of the poet­ry chap­book Octaves, which was a final­ist for the Moon­stone Press Chap­book Con­test. His visu­al art has been fea­tured in a vari­ety of juried exhi­bi­tions, most recent­ly at the Gut­man Gallery in Ann Arbor, Michi­gan, and his visu­al poet­ry has appeared or is forth­com­ing in The Indi­anapo­lis Review and Strange Hym­nal. He received his MFA in poet­ry from Boston Uni­ver­si­ty and is a PhD can­di­date in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, where he serves as the poet­ry edi­tor for Michi­gan Quar­ter­ly Review.