Peter Hennessey, My Hell's Gate, 2010, installation at Gertrude Contemporary.
27 February -
5 February 2010
200 Gertrude Street
200 Gertrude Street, FitzroyOpening Night: Friday 5 February, 6–8pm
Drawing on the mottled and highly litigious history of explosives, Melbourne-based artist Peter Hennessey created a major new performance installation for GCAS.
For this exhibition Hennessy restaged the blast which announced the beginning of the era of explosives, Hell's Gate NY. In a perspex vitrine in the gallery space containing a tonne of water, he undertook a reduced scale recreation of the 1861 blast which remained the largest man-made explosion until the atomic bomb. The project reflects on the huge but strangly invisible role that explosives play in the modern era.
