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

 
     

Jeremy

etching and graphite

22 x 28 inches

2018

     

Jen

etching and graphite

19.5 x 22 inches

2018

     

Britta

etching and graphite

25.5 x 22 inches

2018

   

Esteban

etching and graphite

11.5 x 15.5 inches

2018

       

Rowan

etching and graphite

11.5 x 15.5 inches

2018

 
       

Kris

etching and graphite

11.5 x 15.5 inches

2018

 
       

Shawn

etching and graphite

11.5 x 15.5 inches

2018

 
       

Heidi

etching and graphite

11.5 x 15.5 inches

2018

   
       

Anna

etching and graphite

11.5 x 15.5 inches

2018

       

The Free Spirit

etching and graphite

11.5 x 15.5 inches

2018

 
       

The Shortest Shadow

etching and graphite

15.5 x 11.5 inches

2018