Churner and Churner presents “Dust Breeding,” an exhibition with work by Barney Kulok, Helen Mirra, Lisa Sigal, and Marc Swanson. The works of each artist collect and refract time in physical space: they are, as Rosalind Krauss has written about the concept of the index, “vestiges of that cause which is itself no longer present in the given sign.” The exhibition takes its name from Man Ray’s photograph Dust Breeding (1920), the canonical image of Duchamp’s Large Glass covered with dust.

In Barney Kulok’s high-contrast, silver-gelatin photographs of the construction of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, Louis Kahn’s unfinished memorial is recorded through the remnants of building: a hammer and chisel on a granite step, light streaming through a corner piece. Lisa Sigal’s Hinged Painting (Quito, Ecuador) literally filters the viewer’s perception by placing photographs of urban decay behind a spray-painted window screen. The image is printed on Tyvek paper and mounted on drywall, embedding landscape in the world of construction. Marc Swanson even more explicitly engages how nostalgia and melancholy alter our perception with three new pieces made from discarded crates and draped metal chains, their mundane materials a testament to a presence now lost. Finally, Helen Mirra’s oil-and-graphite Field Notations set up the perception of “having-been-there,” when over the course of a day’s walking, Mirra makes seven prints, one each hour, on the linen she carries in her pack. The work is, in the artist’s words, “a kind of paced printmaking, made through walking.” Together, the exhibition addresses relocation as a trace of memory.

In Man Ray’s photo, the accumulation of dust on Duchamp’s sculpture pictures the indexical nature of the photograph itself. The works in this exhibition are equally mindful of gathering dust, tracing the physical passage of time.

Barney Kulok received his BA from Bard College in 2004. He has exhibited nationally and internationally in both group and solo exhibitions at Shinsegae Gallery, Seoul; Galerie Hussenot, Paris; Galerie Elisabeth Kaufmann, Zürich; de Pury and Luxembourg, Zürich; and Nicole Klagsbrun, New York. Kulok’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cleveland Clinic. In 2012 a monograph of his body of work, Building, was published by Aperture. Kulok lives and works in New York.

Helen Mirra earned an MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1996. She has had solo exhibitions at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; the Dallas Museum of Art; UC Berkeley Art Museum; the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Kunst-Werke Berlin; and Haus Konstruktiv Zürich, as well as at Peter Freeman, Inc., New York and Meyer Riegger Galerie, Berlin, among others. Her work was included in the 30th Venice Biennial and the 50th Sao Paulo Biennial. A selection of Mirra’s awards and residencies include the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (1999), DAAD Fellowship (2004, 2005), Artadia: the Fund for Art and Dialogue (2007), Stiftung Laurenz Haus Residency, Basel (2008-2009), and the IASPIS, Stockholm (2011). She lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lisa Sigal received her MFA from Yale in 1989. Sigal recently had solo shows at LA>

Marc Swanson studied at the Milton Avery Graduate School at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, receiving his MFA in 2004. He has had solo exhibitions at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas; and the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Conn. He has also shown recently at Richard Gray Gallery, New York. Swanson has been the Artist in Residence at La Panadería, Mexicon City (2001), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2000), the IASPIS, Stockholm (1998). He lives and works in Brooklyn.