Witnessing a Sense of Dread Through Painting
Private Collection, exhibited for the 2012 Cream Art Award, emerge ART SPACE WA & Art Source Industry Award WA
The painting Found (Figure 1) depicts the moment that rescue workers found the remaining survivors from the 1972 Andes flight disaster. The denial of specific markers of information and the visually static composition didn’t articulate the violence of the tragedy, instead the black and white photograph appeared to almost be a staged representation of the event. The form of the plane wreck is fractured through the ‘pushing and pulling’ of pictorial depth to reveal a space that is both emerging and reseeding, drawing associations to the disorientation of space experienced during the ‘real-time’ event. However, I also hope that the saturated hues and the limiting of information ‘suspends’ the disaster in an almost virtual space to articulate ones limited if not complete inability to comprehend the horrors of the actual event.
