Dan Starling | WORKS | VIDEOS | CV | ARTIST BOOKS | PRESS |
Sans Sans Soleil |
The video and related drawings Sans Sans Soleil (2018) present a series of documentary images of people in Vancouver. Comprised of two types, images of crowds and images of solitary individuals, the work charts a day from noon to midnight. The work continues Starling’s interest in narrative and began as an attempted remake using the form of Chris Marker’s film. The work assembles a critical montage of inconspicuous images of experience in the “digital age” and thus picks up a theme that is central to modernity: the change in experience for everyday life presented by technology. This theme was central to Walter Benjamin, whose work “On some motifs in Baudelaire” figures prominently in Sans Sans Soleil. In that text, Benjamin uses Baudelaire’s art as well as his life to examine the changing relationship between the artist and the audience, the poet and the reader, the individual and the crowd in modernity. For Benjamin, modernity was marked by disjointed everyday experiences and a disrupted relationship between the present and the past. The trepidation that was felt due to the loss of a cultural memory is still very much our condition today. But in addition, the rise of digital information has brought on a new problem from the opposite direction as Chris Marker recognized: total recall is memory anesthetized. The reservoir of cultural memory that is the internet changes experience due to its ability to preserve information. |
Hannah etching and graphite 30 x 22 inches 2018 |
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Jeremy etching and graphite 22 x 28 inches 2018 |
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Jen etching and graphite 19.5 x 22 inches 2018 |
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Britta etching and graphite 25.5 x 22 inches 2018 |
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Esteban etching and graphite 11.5 x 15.5 inches 2018 |
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Rowan etching and graphite 11.5 x 15.5 inches 2018 |
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Kris etching and graphite 11.5 x 15.5 inches 2018 |
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Shawn etching and graphite 11.5 x 15.5 inches 2018 |
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Heidi etching and graphite 11.5 x 15.5 inches 2018 |
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Anna etching and graphite 11.5 x 15.5 inches 2018 |
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The Free Spirit etching and graphite 11.5 x 15.5 inches 2018 |
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The Shortest Shadow etching and graphite 15.5 x 11.5 inches 2018 |
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