Reflecting on the selection of Dust to Gold for We Are Here, my mind turns to the extraordinary Jewish renaissance across so many cultural and philosophical fields after the horrors and cultural repression of the Holocaust. There are the few that are with us that bore witness to the two points of this profound transformation.

While Dust to Gold bears no literal parallel to the gravity of the above discussed. It runs its own sense of material transformation, while the forms play for a gesture towards body or head. Matter moves down, but unlike an ordinary hourglass, which can be inverted to restart time, the present only descends into history here.

BIOGRAPHY  

Born 1975, Melbourne, Victoria; lives and works in Melbourne. Benjamin Armstrong completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1996. Notable recent projects have included Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006; NEW09, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2009; Walking Backwards to the Place I Come From, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 2010; A First Life Residency Project in Landscape, Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China, 2011; Conjurers, Tolarno Galleries, 2012; and Roundtable: The 9th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea, 2012. Armstrong’s work was the subject of a major monograph, Benjamin Armstrong: Holding a Thread, published in 2010. He was awarded an Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship in 2011