The chalkboard is an object loaded with cultural significance and collective memory: it is
simultaneously a place authority and anxiety, questions and answers, past and present. If you
look at the slate and close your eyes, you might anticipate the screech of new chalk across a
board, hear the clack of a dropped piece of chalk of feel the tickling sensation of clapped eraser
dust rising to your nose.

We are eager to share our collaborative practice again in 2017 with the greater Augusta
community.  Rings of Dust will be our fifth featured collaborative exhibition. The origins of
this collaboration stem from both a close friendship and a shared inspiration of the blackboard in
both of our seemingly disparate art practices. For a number of years Luc Demers has been
exploring the relationships of the blackboard image, impermanence of the night sky, and
photography. Peter Precourt has utilized the iconography and visual language of the blackboard
in his paintings exploring ideas surrounding knowledge and education.  In working together we
have developed a collaborative way of creating, working on the same pieces side-by- side and in
secession, which explores our different and changing feelings about blackboard imagery and its
waning cultural legacy.
Our collaboration has focused on photographs of the moon in the NASA archive. The images
that we create have become a contemplative exercise, which reflect on the connection between
content and materials. We enjoy all of the implications that chalk drawings of the moon offer:
drawings made of dust of the dusty rock orbiting our planet, the visual education of the moon
through photography, the relationship of education from the chalkboard, and the seemingly
eternal presence of the night sky rendered in dust so easily erased. With the recent Saturn
photographs we are interested in depicting the ringed wonder.
Luc Demers and Peter Precourt