The planet cooking inside a BBQ grill
Carnage, Catastrophe and Complicity is inspired by Nick Cave’s White Elephant [lyrics | video], a 60cm | 24in diameter mirror in a black steel frame uses a backdrop of dead or harvested animal images—e.g. pork slaughterhouse, big game hunter trophy photos, stacked bison skulls—with images of war and pollution, with only the center of the mirror’s image field uncovered. The viewer looks through a deep, metal dome (a recycled BBQ grill—a metaphor for a planet being cooked) fastened to the mirror’s perimeter, and spots themselves in the crosshairs of a hunting rifle, amidst the carnage.
Is there any hope left? Look in the mirror for the answer.
Moving clockwise from top we have a very big Big Game Hunter, narrow slits of his eyes gazing as lifelessly as the body of the lion he could have just as easily killed by sitting on rather than shooting with a bullet; directly beneath a lone child cries for his mother in the rubble of a destroyed train station. Shanghai, China, Aug. 28, 1937; an Extinction Rebellion-related illustration of our planet on fire; a picture of skulls from the Cambodia killing fields; a lamb (representing innocence) ready for the slaughter; Japanese soldiers with gas masks; pigs in the slaughterhouse; landfill pollution; in Mexico a worker beating some pigs with a club in order to immobilize them and facilitate the slaughter by throat slitting; an 1870 photo of a huge mound of bison skulls ready for conversion into fertilizer; in front woman cradles the body of her dying husband, circa 1940 and a big game hunter poses with a dead leopard; industrial chicken farm; NRDC water pollution photo; diseased salmon in industrial fish farm; nuclear explosion mushroom cloud.
Materials: 60cm mirror in black steel frame; lid of a BBQ grill; historical and contemporary photos of carnage (war, animal processing, pollution, nuclear explosions, disease, death, warfare, baby sheep
Dimensions: 60cm diameter x 16cm, 4.3kg