IRA LOMBARDY

IRA LOMBARDIA - Dust and Scratches. IMG_0027

Técnica: Natural pigments about Hahnemühle Pa

Biografía del Artista: Asturias, Spain, 1977 She currently lives and works in New York, where she teaches at the Department of Transmedia in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University. An artist and researcher, she works in different media such as photography, video, graphic design and sculpture. Through her projects she questions discourses, dynamics and rhetoric that have been assumed in the field of contemporary art, image and philosophy. Her theoretical and practical production focuses on the transformation of the postmodern paradigm in relation to digital visual culture. In 2021, she opened her first solo exhibition in the United States at SCAD Museum (Savannah (GA), a retrospective exhibition curated by DJ Hellerman that included installation and large-format works. Her latest exhibitions include: A Certain Darkness (Curator Alexandra Laudo, Caixa Forum Barcelona, ​​June 2018– January 2019), Les Nouveaux Encyclopdistes (Curator Joan Fontcuberta, European Festival of Photography, Reggio 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 Biennal, UK, 2014). She has been nominated for the Post-Photography Prototyping Prize (Fotomuseum Winterthur and Julius Baer Foundation, Switzerland, 2016) and has been a beneficiary of the grants PICE, the SCAN Project Room production and residency grant (SCAN, Spanish Contemporary Art Network, July 2018, London), the UCO-LaFragua International Photography Award (Córdoba 2015) or the grant from the Banco Santander Foundation (Entreacto, Madrid, 2015).

DUST & SCRATCHES The most common hybrid process between analogue and digital photography is the scanning process, since nowadays it is essential to scan negatives and slides, both for printing and simply for archiving. The most common problems when carrying out this digitalisation process are those related to dust and scratches. Dust accumulates on the surface of the negatives and also on the scanner glass, producing spots and interfering with the original image. On the other hand, scratches that may be present both on the negative and on the scanner glass produce similar spots; these spots 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 spent many hours on the scanning process, following different protocols that never quite stop with the appearance of dust (from the use of gloves and sprays to spraying water in the air) 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 dust so that it would not appear in the scan did not make sense. In fact, dust was that symbolic, nameless intermediate space between digital and analog photography, that almost imperceptible matter that physically separated both realities. Thus the Dust & Scratches series arose, 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 Nursery" by Man Ray, in which he photographed Duchamp's Large Glass almost unrecognizable, covered in dust (just as the glass of my scanner is covered with the same particles over time). In addition, Man Ray is also the author of the famous photograms, a direct photography process that is also present in this work, in which the light from the scanner captures the dust by contact, just as was done in the early days of photography.