Poems by Christopher Robin Duncan

Essay by Sean McFarland
52 Pages
Hardcover with loose folded sheets
Full Color Offset
9” x 12”
ISBN: 978-1-952523-22-9

Known for his textile and sound work, Christopher Robin Duncan recently turned to photography, rediscovering with a simple and sincere pleasure the medium that he had, for a while, set aside. 

Marked by the question of time, and informed by an intuitive, direct relationship with natural elements, Duncan's practice unfolds anew by the use of photography. Using a half frame camera which, by dividing the film in two, doubles time and space by the same action, Duncan creates interstices—the time of a heartbeat, of a fraction of a second—into which he slips, moves imperceptibly, creating suspended moments.

It is a delicate relationship to time that Duncan offers us with Poems. We find there the ties with seasons and natural cycles; we find there air, water, wind.

Like a volume of poetry, in which rhymes answer and echo each other, the lo-fi yet precious views Duncan gathers are combined in Poems, resonating in the distance, and eventually forming a complete cycle, a perfect revolution around its solar heart.

And, like the wind that blows across the photographed views, we too can experience the unbound pages, rearranging their rhymes into visual sequences each time reimagined.

Christopher Robin Duncan (b. 1974-Perth Amboy, New Jersey) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. Duncan utilizes natural forces and cycles as conceptual and compositional prompts for experiments in sonic and visual efforts. In his long term sun exposure works, sunlight and the passing of time are harnessed to create images which exist in a liminal space between painting and photography. The work is meant to honor time and capture the energy of the locals in which the exposures occur. Outside of his studio practice, he runs LAND AND SEA, a small book and record publishing endeavor, with his partner Maria Otero. Duncan's work is part of the permanent collections at The Berkeley Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Kemper Art Museum, SF Museum of Modern Art, Deyoung Museum, and several other institutions.