Press

Press Release: Remembering 9/11

Moment of Impact 9/11 A glass installation by Lynn Rivers.

The nine door-size glass panels which comprise Moment of Impact 9/11 are the artist’s response to the shocking attacks on 9/11 and the destruction of the Twin Towers.

While there is one overall image in Moment of Impact 9/11, each of the nine panels contains its own particular moment of impact, thus the large-scale installation is filled with 300 detail sandblasted images. The result is a contemporary, and at the same time timeless view of man’s inhumanity. The combination of the large-scale installation with small detailed images creates a resolute and emotionally charged work which nevertheless holds the grotesque in check.

Rivers, like millions of others, experienced the attack and its aftermath through the TV reports. It was the deeply disturbing television images, the chance encounter with Lichtenstein’s Whaam painting, together with opportunity of working in glass that quickly coalesced to provide the initial impetus for Moment of Impact 9/11. The 300 images that form the nine panels reference earlier artists experience of aerial aggression and terror as in Picasso’s Guernica, or Rosenquist’s F111 or Lichtenstein’s Whaam, as well as contemporary everyday concerns and objects. There is no chronology attached to the panels nor are they a literal description.

Rivers worked as a photographer specializing in museum work and close-up photography before working in glass. The images in glass are produced by using flashed glass, that is a glass sheet made with a thin layer of one colour on a thicker base of another. The images are produced by sandblasting the thin layer away, controlled through masking film with the images cut out with a scalpel. Moment of Impact 9/11 took two years to make.

It is one of the very few responses to 9/11 made in Britain.

21st August 2005
© Lynn Rivers 2005

<< Previous | Next >>