Matthew Brandt, Demolition of Madison Square Garden, 1925. 2014

Matthew Brandt’s Dust series shared the Yossi Milo Gallery with his La Brea series in the recent exhibition Excavations.These works were made with a similar antique process and arduous procedure.

Paying a kind of hommage to New York’s lost buildings, he collected dust from the site of long gone structures such as the old Madison Square Garden demolished in the 1920s. He sourced photographs of the demolitions from the public library and proceeded to make Gum Bichromate prints from them. This process is a cross between photography and printmaking and was popular in Pictorialist times.

Brandt’s process differed from earlier versions because instead of using colour pigment to make the prints, he used the dust he had collected.

Brandt’s Dust prints compress time by reproducing historical photographs of demolished sites and buildings with physical elements from the present.

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