Salted Drops
Gersht, Ori (2016) Salted Drops. [Exhibition/show, Photography]
- Details
Commissioned by: Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany.
A single water drop is falling in extreme slow motion through space toward its collision with the water surface, which reflects two portraits by the 17th century artist Govert Flinck.
On impact, a chain reaction is triggered and the portraits become animated, appearing to breath, mutate and change personality, as if springing back to life.
It is as if the impact of the collision transforms memory and manifests it as a tangible trace, turning the past into the lived present, compressing history and time.
At one point the camera shifts its focus and looks in extreme close up directly through the slowly falling drop of water. Trapped inside the drop that function like an ephemeral crystal lens, is the sharp image of the portrayed woman and together they travel through space towards the inescapable collision with the surface of the water. On impact the drop disappears, initially drowned in the water before slowly reemerging and springing up into the air, as if defying gravity and trying to escape its inevitable destiny.
The work, entitled Salted Drops, emanates a meditative melancholic atmosphere, suggesting a metaphor for the comprehensive work of mourning.
At the same time, a fictitious, artificial dialogue is spun between Flinck’s self-portrait and the portrait of an unknown lady, providing shimmering insights into the intensely charged relationship between the painter and the model.
The film was captured by a high speed camera at a frame rate of 2500 fps, revealing events that were occurring in the folds of time. In this work that was commissioned by the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany, for a surevay exhibition of Gover Flink’s work at his native town on his 400 anniversary, I was attempting to establish a dialogue between past and present, between art history and and technology. Therefore I chose to use cutting edge technologies to capture a world that was unavailable to Flink and his contemporaries. I was conceving the drop as an optical device and was drawing analogy between the 17th century and contemporary life, between the, the area of the microscope and the telescope and virtual world of the digital revolution. In doing so, I was attempting to explore the relationships between representation and truth.
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