"When Things Fall Apart" by Sasha Bezzubov

Front Room Gallery
2007-04-01

Entropy is the natural force that brings destruction and decay to man and his hubristic sense of order. The Romantics, like Casper David Friedrich and Lord Byron, aesthetisized the ruin and remnant, and found comfort in the contemplation of man’s fragile transience here on earth. Sasha Bezzubov has traveled to locations and photographed the results of natural disasters, earthquakes, tsunamis, and forest-fires, and his images contain a modern sense of the dynamic compression of time, a ruin that happens in seconds rather than decades. Distilling beauty from scenes of such tragedy and devastation may seem perverse. Seeing a large diptych of gray mud-covered debris stretching to the horizon, or the deep chiaroscuro of charred tree trunks against mounds of powered ash and burned out muscle-cars, rendered in hyper-sharp detail, one is left with a appreciation for what may be our own supposed security from these ravages of nature.

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