Liquidation: Drawing Past, 2005
C-print
31 1/2″ x 39 3/8″
Courtesy of the Artist and Angles Gallery, Los Angeles
In this work from Gersht’s Liquidation series, historical time and lost memory are again evoked through the blurred and somber darkness of forest trees. Over the course of several journeys into rural Galicia, a region in southwest Ukraine from which his family originated, Gersht photographed landscapes that held both the histories of his origin and historical resonance. Speaking on his personal relationship to this work:
When I was looking at the landscape in the Ukraine I was seeing all these houses and trees that were there 60 years before and are living there now with total indifference to the human horrors that took place but somehow bear within them the memory of those events. Our sense of time as human beings is limited to 70 or 80 years but all these landscapes spread over a cosmic or geological perception of time. Some of the trees are hundreds and hundreds of years old, they bear with them the memory of all previous events and at the same time keep a certain silence and are impenetrable.
– An excerpt from an interview with Ori Gersht by Camilla Jackson, Senior Curator at the The Photographers Gallery in London
–Natalie Marsh
Director, Gund Gallery
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