BLAST

BLAST was the title given to the journal of the Vorticists, an English movement that straddled the start and end of the Great War. In the first issue of BLAST, the poet Ezra Pound describes the vortex as “that point in the cyclone where energy cuts into space and imparts form to it”. BLAST is an installation by Carl Rowe that presents the viewer with signals of conflict, weapons testing, aggression, dehumanisation and eradication. There is a sinister but also laughable reference to a crime scene investigation, where a slumped but now removed body of a man is outlined in blocks of lard. BLAST is the point in the cyclone where energy cuts into flesh and excretes form from it. "I just went to see an interesting show involving red and white sticks warning of an apocalypse maybe, almost as if blasted or irradiated, like a sign in the desert, the opposite of a divining stick, or perhaps come to think of it they are divining. And the trace of a human being in animal fat in a dark back room…" Simon Granger