The Digital Gallery: The Dark Matter

The Learning Space is proud to present The Dark Matter by Melbourne artist Dustin Voggenreiter.

The Dark Matter is a series of digitally animated GIFs, daisy-chained together into an endlessly looping work of art. The project harnesses the ancient symbolic omen of shooting stars, framed (literally) within the evolving theories of perception proposed by contemporary cognitive psychologists. These two ideas (ancestral symbolism and the evolution of human perception) continue to confuse, seduce and inform Dustin's practice.

Large swathes of this work are absorbed by darkness - poetically eluding to the gaps in our species ability to grasp reality. This is an idea which extends from Plato’s famous cave shadow allegory (500+ BCE) to avant-garde theories proposed by Cognitive Psychologist Dr Donald Hoffman, all of which highlight the inadequacy of human perception. We are, in essence, trapped.

It is Dustin's conjecture as an artist that we can only ever begin to resolve the plethora of issues presenting us as a species, once we understand and accept the biases, blind spots, and unresolved design ‘flaws’ which evolution has endowed us with. We peer through a narrow perceptual window at reality.

The Dark Matter utilises the monotony inherent in the GIF format as a means of channelling the looping, unresolved nature of these ideas. Like a scratched record stuck in its groove, it seems as though humans too will be forever trapped within our species specific experience of reality.

Dustin J Voggenreiter is an Australian artist whose work communes with ancestral spirits, sharing a deep empathy for the human condition. His practice spans contemporary abstraction and installation, with an aesthetic bent towards monochromatic minimalism.

Dustin’s work spans an eclectic material pallet which speaks to a post-covid aesthetic; using materials at-hand, recycling and reappropriating. Methods of concealment and obscuring serve to simplify the conceptual complexity of who we are as a species, habitually informed by the dramatic, tumultuous 21st century news cycle. His works are at once pleasurable explorations of texture, colour, and improvisation, as well as being a meditation on the invisible forces underlying human nature.

Dustin has recently graduated from the MFA program at RMIT, has started exhibiting at galleries around Melbourne, and has completed the SITUATE Residency during the first half of 2022.