IRA LOMBARDIA

IRA LOMBARDIA - Dust and Scratches. Img_0027

Technique: Natural pigment print on hahnemühle paper photo rag Ultra Soft - Natural pigment print on hahnemühle paper photo rag ultra soft

Artist Biography: Asturias, Spain, 1977 She currently lives and works in New York, where she teaches in the Department of Transmedia at the School of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University. Artist and researcher, she works in different media such as photography, video, graphic design and sculpture. With her projects she questions discourses, dynamics and rhetorics that have been assumed in the field of contemporary art, image or philosophy. His production, both theoretical and practical, focuses on the transformation of the postmodern paradigm in relation to digital visual culture. In 2021 he opened at SCAD Museum (Savannah (GA), his first solo exhibition in the United States, a retrospective curated by DJ Hellerman that included installation and large format works. Among his latest exhibitions are: A Certain Darkness (Curator Alexandra Laudo, Caixa Forum Barcelona, June 2018- January 2019), Les Nouveaux Encyclopdistes (Curator Joan Fontcuberta, European Photography Festival, Regio Emilia, Italy, 2017), The Billboard Creative International Exhibition (Curator Mona Kuhn, Los Angeles, USA, 2016) and Not All Photographs Are Records, (Curator Lorenzo Fusi, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool Biennial, UK, 2014).She has been nominated for the Post-Photography Prototyping Prize (Fotomuseum Winterthur and Julius Baer Foundation, Switzerland, 2016) and has been the recipient of PICE grants, the SCAN Project Room production and residency grant (SCAN, Spanish Contemporary Art Network, July 2018, London) the Premio Internacional de Fotografía UCO-LaFragua (Córdoba 2015) or the Fundación Banco Santander grant (Entreacto, Madrid, 2015).

 

DUST & SCRATCHES The most common hybrid process between analog and digital photography is the scanning process, since nowadays it is essential to scan negatives and slides, either for printing or simply for archiving. The most common problems when performing this scanning process are those related to dust and scratches. Dust accumulates on the surface of the negatives and also on the scanner glass, producing stains and interfering with the original image. On the other hand, scratches that may be present on both the negative and the scanner glass produce similar stains; these stains will then have to be removed by retouching processes, so it is common to find Dust and Scratches filters in the scanner software, which work to avoid or hide both problems simultaneously. After having dedicated numerous hours to the scanning process, following different protocols that never end with the appearance of dust (from the use of gloves and sprays to spraying water in the environment) I began to reflect on it. Thinking about the paradigm shift between digital and analog photography, I realized that perhaps the impossible and frustrating method of trying to avoid the dust from appearing in the scan was pointless. In fact, dust was that nameless, symbolic in-between space between digital and analog photography, that almost imperceptible matter that physically separated the two realities. Thus arose the series Dust & Scratches, where the main subject is dust, which is deposited naturally after several days in my scanner. It is also a tribute to one of the photographs that has always fascinated me: "The Dust Hatchery" by Man Ray, in which he photographed the Great Glass of Duchamp almost unrecognizable, covered with dust (just as the glass of my scanner is covered with the same particles, by the passage of time). In addition, Man Ray is also the author of the famous photograms, a process of direct photography, which is also present in this work, in which the light of the scanner captures the dust by contact, as it was done in the early days of photography.