Steve Dutton

‘Dept. of Atrocities’
Prints, Drawings and Flash Animation

This was the outcome of an attempt to negotiate a set of photographs which we came across which represented significant incidents of the 20th Century, including genocide, mass violence and deprivation but also more benign imagery such as children playing or a man reading the paper.

The final installation contained around 60 of these images framed up in a grid structure which is, like so much of our work, almost impossible to document.

Like much of our work we are encoding representations and meanings without explicitly revealing them. This is particularly the case with images such as these where we are not only asking questions about the documentary representation of violence but also continuing to ask questions about the nature of an image itself. The dahlia flower heads are also a series of hybrids and ‘refined’ strains like the images themselves. The flower head, despite being in full bloom, is inverted and therefore looking towards the ground as opposed to the sun