LOVE STORY/ PRECIOUS LIVES II

10-27 June 2009 Mair Gallery COCA, Christchurch

This series of large paintings are derived from images of bombings. The original photographs travel from very real and deliberately catastrophic events. They move through cyberspace, circumnavigating the minds of global media makers, to remerge onto the pages of newspapers around the world with the intention of illustrating a political event. Through this route, they arrive into the smallness of our daily individual lives.
I have taken these images and made them into paintings that exist within the reality of a western painted tradition. The images reference the modernist art traditions of cubism, abstraction, and American abstract expressionism, which were motivated by illusions of progress, power and control. In our current era, the paintings reflect the paradox of being simultaneously absolutely precious, and yet frighteningly inconsequential. The images explore the complex trajectories between processes of power and their movements across historical , social, and geographical contexts.

Car Bomb I- Sadr Baghdad March 2007,
layered acrylic oil on canvas, 1400 x 1000

Home 1- Georgia August 2008,
layered acrylic oil on canvas 1800 x 1980

Debris- Riyadh November 2003,
layered acrylic oil on canvas 2100 x 1700

Hotel- Jakarta August 2003,
layered acrylic oil on canvas 1810 x 1280

Home II- Gaza City July 2005,
layered acrylic oil on canvas 2250 x 1800

Home III- Sderot Israel November 2006,
layered acrylic oil on canvas 2580 x 1820

Medical Clinic- Nahariya Israel August 2006,
layered acrylic oil on canvas 2580 x 1800

Car Bomb II- Sadr Baghdad, July 2006,
layered acrylic oil on canvas 1770 x 1530