Ori Gersht: Altered States

In Becoming, Gersht explores the fundamental relationship between creation and entropy through the canonical structure imposed by museums upon their collections. In the artist’s studio, images of paintings drawn from the postcard collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam are printed onto analogously sized sheets of glass and then carefully arranged on a specially constructed wall that mimics a traditional postcard display. Order cedes to chaos as each wall of glass is methodically shattered. Recorded by the camera at the instant of destruction, a new space of creation emerges. In this photographic space, Gersht visualizes the entropic forces that these institutional systems resist as the images shatter into dispersed fragments of collective memory, perhaps returning to the state of disorder from which they originated. In Wall 01, a large-scale work constructed with over 200 postcards from the Metropolitan Museum, pivotal art historical works from the 16th – 19th centuries are shown at the moment of collapse. In the companion piece Wreckage Upon Wreckage, comprised of the shattered fragments from Wall 01, the strata of art history coalesce into a single plane, undermining the linearity imposed by the institutions. In this unregulated chaos, a treasure hunt of new compositions and narratives materializes. 

In the series On Reflection, Gersht explores the roles of artifice and illusion in both painting and photography. For this project, he meticulously constructed silk flower replicas of three 17th century floral paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder, in which the painter depicted bouquets of flawless flowers that in actuality bloom at different times and in disparate locations. Placing his floral arrangements in front of mirrors, Gersht then shattered the reflective glass, photographing simultaneously with two cameras which each captured different views of the event. Through this combination of art, craft, science and technology, Gersht questions the relationship between painting, photography and objective truth.