Stomp
Photos from the Stomp project
Jon Carapiet
Wellington
31 May - 19 June 2018
Artist talk and function Saturday 9 June, 1.30-3.30pm
Stomp comprises images made in Europe, India and Egypt since 2014 and began as a personal response to the destruction in Bamiyan and Timbuktu, Palmyra and Aleppo. Such recent manifestations of fascism have 20th Century antecedents in the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, but trace even further back in human consciousness. There is a long history of attempting to erase people from memory.
Stomp seeks to reach beyond a sense of despair and engage our shared humanity. It calls on powers of empathy and universal understanding that survive any detachment from individual identity. Viewed through this lens the violence of human action becomes merely an acceleration of the disappearance wrought by time itself. As such the images are all the same: portraits of everyman and everywoman from every time and every place; pictures of us.