Inspiration: Blow Up

The first in a series of blog posts about artworks, artists or anything else that has inspired me

Blow Up (2007- 8) by Ori Gersht

I saw this work in an exhibition in London called Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures (2010). A group show exploring the vanitas genre concerning the transience of life and the futlity of earthly desires, often represented with symbols such as candles, insects, mirrors and flowers. Subject matter I often use.

The exhibition was incredible but the piece of work that most captivated me was Blow Up (2007-8) by Ori Gersht – a series of large photographs capturing the process of the detonation of a flower arrangement.

Blow Up (above) was inspired by the still life floral oil painting called The Rosy Wealth of June (1886) (below)  by the French painter Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904).

Gersht froze his re creation of this flower arrangement in liquid nitrogen and concealed small explosive charges within it. He then detonated them and used several cameras to capture the instantaneous moment of explosion using very fast camera speeds of seven and a half thousandths of a second.

The speed is too fast for the brain to process but technology can capture it and show us its reality.

It is extremely beautiful and very violent. I have to admit that I found it mesmerizingly beautiful for a long time before I considered the destruction and violence. But even then I find the destruction beautiful, or rather, the photographs of the destruction. So maybe the photograph is standing between me (the viewer) and the reality of what is happening (the explosion), and so the destruction becomes more of an abstract concept?

It definitely makes me think of the ephemeral and vulnerable condition of nature and humankinds hand in ruining it, which is what much of my artwork is concerned with.

To read more about Ori Gersht visit his website