HANKER SORE

“lounging”

luke whitford, 2016

The developed film has been corroded by the same chemicals humans have imposed upon the environment being photographed.

“What happens to the initial amount absorbed into the ground? Or by the plants or animals that are there at the spill site? If this is the effect they have on a piece of plastic, what is it doing to our environment?”

Ravi Zupa’s “The Turmoil of Being” at Hashimoto Contemporary.

Opening on Thursday, September 1st, 2016 at Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco, California is Ravi Zupa’s solo exhibition “The Turmoil of Being.”

Taking cues from Renaissance portraiture, totalitarian propaganda and Eastern iconography, Zupa creates a unique universe of historic characters and anthropomorphic creatures. Figures are precisely rendered to emulatethe stylings of Japanese wood-block illustrations, Medieval religious art, and zoological drawings. However, each pastiche is intervened with bold reference to modernity and a looming dystopian future. “The Turmoil of Being” brings together several of Zupa’s ongoing bodies of work. His series, “Age of Enlightenment,” display his mastery of combining traditional methods of printmaking, assemblage, and painting. Zupa’s ornate work seems as it were unearthed from centuries ago, yet it contains traces of our contemporary age. Dreamlike, unsettling and mysterious, these works unify what is seemingly unrelated, to strive towards something universal.

In his continuing series, “Mightier Than,” Zupa dismantles and welds together pieces of antique typewriters to create realistic depictions of modern assault rifles. Upon closer inspection, barrels and triggers are merely carriages and keys. Each weapon is even loaded with ammunition meticulously crafted from discarded pencil stubs and fountain-pens. This work confronts the violent and absurd by re-interpreting the old adage “the pen is mightier than the sword.”

Woman and Child Fall From Broken Fire Escape

In 1975, 19-year-old Diana Bryant and her two-year-old goddaughter Tiare Jones fell from a broken fire escape during an apartment house fire in Boston, Massachusetts. 

The heat had forced them into the furthest corner of the fire escape. A firefighter was on a ladder nearby and asked for Bryant to hand him the child. When she attempted to do this, the fire escape gave way. 

Bryant broke Jone’s fall, saving the child, but she died later that night from her injuries. This picture prompted officials in Boston and other cities around the country to rewrite its fire escape safety laws.