Towards Another (Big Bang) Theory

The images of explod­ing fuel from Geof­frey H. Short’s exhib­i­tion Towards Anoth­er (Big Bang) The­ory at {Suite} Gal­lery on Ori­ent­al Parade are imme­di­ately evoc­at­ive to me of a num­ber of dif­fer­ent oth­er imager­ies, occur­ring in roughly this order:

• of the US mil­it­ary nap­alm­ing bits of Viet­nam
• of Fran­cis Ford Cop­pola nap­alm­ing bits of the Phil­lipines pre­tend­ing to be the US mil­it­ary nap­alm­ing bits of Viet­nam (for Apo­ca­lypse Now)
• of the Iraqi mil­it­ary set­ting fire to Kuwaiti oil wells in Wern­er Herzo­g’s doc­u­ment­ary Les­sons of Dark­ness
• of fire-fight­ers from vari­ous parts of the world try­ing to extin­guish and cap the burn­ing oil wells in Les­sons of Dark­ness
• of thou­sands of hec­tares of earth smothered and choked by crude oil (Les­sons of Dark­ness).

So, basic­ally, invok­ing the visu­ally spec­tac­u­lar ‘hor­rors’ of war.

Short hired film industry spe­cial effects tech­ni­cians to cre­ate “big bangs” on the black sands of New Zealand’s west coast, using fossil fuel (with all its geo-polit­ic­al asso­ci­ations) mixed with gun­powder (with its own his­tory of war, plots and dan­ger­ous enter­tain­ment) as an unpre­dict­able, dra­mat­ic and multi-layered ima­ging mater­i­al. This work is an inter­rog­a­tion of that mater­i­al, and of the effects of present­ing “ter­rible objects” in an aes­thet­ic realm.

{Suite} Gal­lery writes about the work:

The inher­ent mys­tery and ulti­mate inev­it­ab­il­ity of death makes it a staple sub­ject of con­tem­pla­tion in philo­sophy and in art. Risk­ing death means both ter­ror and excite­ment, and the eight­eenth cen­tury philo­soph­ers Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant sug­ges­ted that whatever is ter­ri­fy­ing is also sub­lime.

Geof­frey H. Short’s series towards anoth­er (big bang) the­ory is an explor­a­tion of risk, ter­ror, beauty and the sub­lime. The fuel explo­sion is part of the cine­mat­ic vocab­u­lary of spe­cial effects and as such is a sim­u­la­tion of ter­ror.

So, basic­ally, war and war movies. Looks like we’re all on the same page then!

I say:

The images are simple, fas­cin­at­ing and vis­cer­ally enga­ging, and I urge you to check them out in per­son. My only com­plaint is that some of them are pos­sibly not big enough; I would rather see them all at a lar­ger scale.

Mark Amery has writ­ten about the show on The Big Idea, and I think the piece also appeared in the Domin­ion Post.

Geof­frey H. Short lives in Auck­land, New Zea­l­and. He gradu­ated Bach­el­or of Fine Arts with first class hon­ours from the Uni­ver­sity of Auck­land in 2010 and was awar­ded a Seni­or Prize in Fine Arts. His work is included in the sur­vey exhib­i­tion and book “reGen­er­a­tion² – tomor­row’s pho­to­graph­ers today” pro­duced by the Musée d l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzer­land and tour­ing inter­na­tion­ally.

Towards Anoth­er (Big Bang) The­ory runs at {Suite} Gal­lery until the 17^th of July, 2011.

{Suite} Gal­lery, 108 Ori­ent­al Parade, Wel­ling­ton.

Gal­lery open most days & by appoint­ment.

For more inform­a­tion vis­it their web­site, email them, or con­tact the gal­lery through their handy web-form.