DangerInEvolution

Ah, the relentless march of science. For two artists, Kicca Igaly and Nessuno Myoo, it's sometimes marching too quickly or without much consideration for risk or ethics. Their joint project at LEA27, DangerInEvolution, reflects on these concerns from an artistic perspective. I'm not sure I concur with their argument (spelled out with considerable detail in the installation's notes), but the artwork is certainly worth seeing either way. The default windlight setting is Phototools-Breakwave Building Light, and if you don't have this (it's included in the most recent Firestorm release) it would be worth loading.

Of the two installations, I found that by Nessuno Myoo aesthetically more intriguing (top two images)—or at least for me as a photographer it was more interesting to explore. What at first appears to be a fairly abstract design has darker undertones: a central carousel with swinging figures is, to use the artist's words, "the 'poetic' transfiguration of a huge and monstrous mushroom cloud, caused by the explosion of the first of the two notorious bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki between 6 and 9 August 1945."

Kicca Igaly's work (lower two images), by contrast, places us in a sinister laboratory setting—one in which we the visitors are quite tiny, perhaps the equivalent of six inches or fifteen centimeters tall, dwarfed by the equipment and the shadowy figures using it. Radioactive waste litters the site, and correspondingly some children in the scene are missing limbs. Not a pretty picture, but both creators display considerable talent transforming their concepts into powerful artistic statements.