Nearing Each Other: Justin Emmanuel Dumas

Nearing Each Other, the 89th installment in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum Series, invites us to reimagine our own complex connections to place as a site of unfolding relationships. In this exhibition, place may be an environment, a material experience, or a memory to suggest notions of belonging and transformation.

Pittsburgh’s postindustrial landscape and the effect of our built environment are central to Justin Emmanuel Dumas’s work. His use of materials explores the legibility of patina, fragmentation, and gradation to construct forms that evoke infrastructural decay. Playing with the opacity of surfaces and imagery, Dumas is interested in conjuring moments of material suspension for the viewer and a mindfulness of space. Works like Détrompe, Möbius (2024) and Iron Gut Anima (2024) simultaneously reveal and conceal to create boundaries that act as membranes or surfaces in transition from one side to the other. For Dumas, the notion of a membrane, skin, or gossamer boundary relates to his thinking around the ways in which our surrounding infrastructures permeate the landscape, informing unique moments of transformation.