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Ground Zero Redux
GROUND ZERO REDUX is the publication for the exhibition of the same name, staged at the Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver, in 2008.
New and recent work by six Vancouver artists explore the complex conceptual, narrative and material trajectories of the term "Ground Zero." This exhibition - featuring photography, drawing, digital video projection, text and bookwork, assemblage, painting and kinetic sculpture - looks across a diverse range of artistic practice to explore the creative efficacy of Ground Zero, reevaluating the enduring legacy of this term as it relates to our current moment.
Ground Zero was first used as a name for the areas directly below atomic explosions (beginning with the Trinity Test Site, Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945), later signifying reinvention or rebirth through acts of leveling, collapse, total destruction or reduction to essences and tabula rasa-like states. While the violent creative/destructive essentialism of these scenarios has been critically derided across a variety of fields, Ground Zero mythologies continue to influence both the nebulous terrain of political policy, environmental discourse and philosophical inquiry, and the often urgent, definitive nature of our global socio-economic realities and ecological situation. The ongoing spectre of 9-11 - its place in our present narratives of protection, justification and preemption, and the resulting fallout of the actualization of these ideas - is a grave example of this. As this exhibition suggests, notions of Ground Zero can also persist in what philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called "bare life" - the reduction of people to Ground Zero-like states through incarceration, expulsion from political community, denial of rights and resources, torture and extreme poverty.
With these complications in mind, artists in this exhibition enact a variety of experiments with ideas of Ground Zero that are not strictly deconstructive, archeological or ironic. Instead, the works choose to critically engage the possibilities of starting over, and restoring points of departure to consciousness.
Ground Zero Redux
Curated by Jeremy Todd
Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Saturday, March 8 to Saturday, April 5, 2008
New and recent work by six Vancouver artists explore the complex conceptual, narrative and material trajectories of the term "Ground Zero." This exhibition - featuring photography, drawing, digital video projection, text and bookwork, assemblage, painting and kinetic sculpture - looks across a diverse range of artistic practice to explore the creative efficacy of Ground Zero, reevaluating the enduring legacy of this term as it relates to our current moment.
Ground Zero was first used as a name for the areas directly below atomic explosions (beginning with the Trinity Test Site, Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945), later signifying reinvention or rebirth through acts of leveling, collapse, total destruction or reduction to essences and tabula rasa-like states. While the violent creative/destructive essentialism of these scenarios has been critically derided across a variety of fields, Ground Zero mythologies continue to influence both the nebulous terrain of political policy, environmental discourse and philosophical inquiry, and the often urgent, definitive nature of our global socio-economic realities and ecological situation. The ongoing spectre of 9-11 - its place in our present narratives of protection, justification and preemption, and the resulting fallout of the actualization of these ideas - is a grave example of this. As this exhibition suggests, notions of Ground Zero can also persist in what philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called "bare life" - the reduction of people to Ground Zero-like states through incarceration, expulsion from political community, denial of rights and resources, torture and extreme poverty.
With these complications in mind, artists in this exhibition enact a variety of experiments with ideas of Ground Zero that are not strictly deconstructive, archeological or ironic. Instead, the works choose to critically engage the possibilities of starting over, and restoring points of departure to consciousness.
Ground Zero Redux
Curated by Jeremy Todd
Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Saturday, March 8 to Saturday, April 5, 2008
38 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
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