Into dust

Photography represents a mode of conceptual, material and philosophical enquiry for Melbourne-born, Frankfurt-based artist James Tunks. An expansion from his 2017 solo exhibition Elsewhere at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne), his debut book 'Into Dust' sees Tunks construct fake astronomical photographs using found and accumulated materials, crushed and pulverised to mimic interstellar nebular. While these sweeping vistas are immersive and engulfing in their scope, their material listings come to form fascinating abstract texts, echoing the history of astrophotography and its pioneers, Edwin Hubble and EE Barnard among them, as astutely as they tease out Tunks' day-to-day. Into Dust forges an ode to the genre and sketches an indirect self-portrait in the same breath.