Darkness moves by Wendy Heldmann

Darkness moves by Wendy Heldmann. Limited edition prints available on 20×200.

From the 20×200 blog:

In venerating and elevating disaster scenes as paintings, Wendy is opening up quite a can of worms. Photos of disaster can masquerade as documentary, photo-journalism, reportage - call it whatever you like. Disasters, natural and man-made, march across our broadsheets, tabloids, monitors and tv screens. We’re not allowed to think of them as beautiful because they are bad and because they’re photos, we might be tempted to believe that they’re the whole truth. And yet, their beauty is what makes us look and what we’re looking at and/or choosing to see is merely some person’s version of the truth.

And this is where it gets really uncomfortable - Wendy’s paintings embrace (perhaps invent?) the beauty of these scenes, and well, you just don’t do that, do you? Not out loud at least. We don’t talk about it. It might occur to us as part of our own inner dialog but it’s not something to be discussed in polite company. Which is awfully ironic considering how preoccupied our culture is with violence, imagery and… images of violence. Because we don’t talk about it, I’ve always felt a little funny-in-a-bad way about how the memory of disaster works in my mind.

Read the whole post here.