Opening 14 January 2011, Diemar/Noble photography will present works by Geoffrey H. Short and Nikolai Ishchuk in the exhibition ‘Big Bangs Big Bucks.’
Short collaborates with special effects technicians to document images of controlled explosions, exploring ideas of risk, beauty, terror and the sublime in his series ‘towards another (big bang) theory’.
Ishchuk’s images also explore the aesthetics of a subject matter which is usually ignored in light of its cultural currency – and in this series, the subject matter is just that: currency.
The two photographers, using vastly different subject matter, are using photography to abstract, dissect, and examine in similar, highly-detailed ways.
Short’s work is an interrogation of that material and an investigation into the differences between the live experience of an explosion and the two dimensional representation of it as an aesthetic object. The illusion of reality is reinforced by the fine detail and the large scale of the photographs, while the images allude to every explosion from the original big bang of creation to the anxiously anticipated big bang of a terrorist bomb or nuclear disaster.
The exhibition continues with ‘Big Bucks,’ a series by Nikolai Ishchuk. The oversized photographic Lambda prints give money the abstract treatment by turning banknotes into large detailed and colourful canvases. Thus, they become totems, objects of worship and celebration, both exploiting and subverting the cult status of money.
The images hint at an implied meaning or symbolism, but at the same time defer, if not altogether deny, many interpretational cues — both factual information (location, time) and visual information (clear focus, recognizable shapes) are complicated by Ishchuk’s treatment. For him, the work is a comment on the mutable character of money, its endless transitions to and from various imaginary states (not unlike art itself), serving, among other things, as a metaphor for boom and bust, the bubbles and the crunches.
Private View 13th January 2011 18:30 – 20:30
Exhibition 14th January – 12th March 2011
Nikolai Ishchuk will be giving a talk about his series “Big Bucks” on Tuesday 1st of March at 6.30pm. The talk is free but spaces are limited, to book a place please email the gallery at education@diemarnoble.com .
