STARDUST-BPM2025
Playa dust, rainwater, and sumi ink — sealed onto canvas. How a painting became a record of a frequency.
STARDUST-BPM2025 is the first painting in a series I started making on the playa at Burning Man 2025. It is sumi ink on canvas, with playa dust and rainwater from the storm sealed into the surface under polycrylic. 96” × 36”. Currently on display at ModA Curations in Gramercy Park, NYC.
The painting isn’t a picture of the playa. It has the playa in it. Material weather, not representation.
the source material
Every Burning Man, a specific weather happens — not the dust storms on Instagram, the actual chemistry. The alkaline dust from the lakebed, the rainwater that hits maybe three times in ten days, and the heat that seals them together. The week before the burn I decided I wanted to capture that chemistry directly, not reproduce it.
- /Raw Belgian linen — primed once, no gesso on the second layer (to let the dust bite).
- /Playa dust collected from three zones (deep playa, Esplanade, and the camp of origin).
- /Rainwater from the unexpected storm on day 5.
- /Sumi ink — Kuretake, ceremonial grade.
- /Polycrylic (matte) — to seal everything in a single non-yellowing coat.
grounding the canvas
I laid the canvas flat on the desert floor the morning after the storm. The surface is already doing something before I touch it — the dust is tracked into the weave by foot traffic, by wind, by condensation.
marking with ink
The sumi ink went down in gestural passes, wet-into-wet, following the BPM of the set I had played at sunrise that morning. 122 BPM. Each “beat” of the brush is a mark; the intervals are the silences.
The ink follows the BPM of the sunrise set. 122 beats per minute of deep house, translated into brush intervals.
the dust application
While the ink was still wet I pressed the dust into the surface — not scattered, pressed. The dust binds to the ink and becomes part of the matte. In a few places I wet a corner of the canvas with the stored rainwater so the dust dissolved and bled into a paler wash.
the seal
Back in the Brooklyn studio a week later, the dust was locked in but still fragile. I applied three thin matte polycrylic coats over 48 hours. Each coat is a day of waiting — you can’t rush it or the playa bloats. What the polycrylic does is flip the surface from ephemeral to permanent without changing the color temperature.
why it matters
The piece isn’t about Burning Man. It’s about the translation — taking a specific time and place, a specific weather and frequency, and getting them onto canvas in a way that preserves what happened. A painting as a recording. The BPM in the title is literal — it’s the tempo of the sunrise set. The stardust is literal — it’s the dust from the playa.
Every piece in this series will follow the same rule: the materials have to come from the place and the time. No imported pigments, no studio stand-ins. The next one (WATERFALL, currently on canvas) uses rainwater from Itatiaia National Park and red iron oxide from the riverbed — but that’s a different story.
where to see it
STARDUST-BPM2025 is currently on display at ModA Curations in Gramercy Park, NYC. The painting will be traveling with the collection through 2026; reach out for private viewing.
- /96” × 36” · sumi ink, playa dust, rainwater, polycrylic on linen
- /Currently at ModA Curations, Gramercy Park, NYC
- /Available for private viewing — inquire at zo@studiozonyc.com