CityLife

Dust

FIRST prize for visiting this exhibition goes to anyone who can find it without the aid of a map and compass. Did someone pull the short straw or did Urbis just forget that Dust was coming to Manchester?

Hastily pinned to the wall between the main entrance and the café, Dust consists of 22 images depicting chance encounters with strange objects and quirky lighting situations.

The everyday is well-observed and captured with a sense of immediacy, with an emphasis on all of the potentially beautiful images we ignore because we don’t look close enough, from bleached lines of grass on a football pitch to beams of light on hardwood floors.

The most striking images of all are the ‘accidentally arranged’: newspapers jammed into the forks of tree branches that are begging to be asked how they got there. This is where Dust shines; random occurrences that appear from nowhere communicate the impact the exhibition strives for, rather than those which are clearly contrived.

The image of a handgun is jarringly self-conscious and one which leaves us a little cold, but with a gift for making the mundane terribly exciting with delightful high contrast colours, Dust deserves more attention than its current exhibition space allows.

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