BENDITO’S PRINTS TRANSCEND THE HORROR OF THE EVENTS DEPICTED IN THE ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHS. (...) THEY PROVIDE A MONUMENT TO MOURN, REMEMBER, HONOR AND REFLECT... –Dossin
manipulates digitally, building new relations between humans and nature through shapes and colors. Bendito’s color palettes provide the viewer with an alternative entry point for the events that they depict. While such an abstraction of the original photograph may suggest an attempt to disguise the events they depict by masking them with an abstract grid, Bendito’s abstractions reveal in fact a desire to reconstruct what had been destroyed and find some inexpugnable order beneath the chaos. This process of abstraction and reconstruction is documented on a website Bendito created as a part of this project (naturaldisastercolor.net). It was indeed essential for him to bring the Natural Disaster Color series back to the Internet since it is so deeply rooted in the digital reality of the Web. Yet, the final images had to be printed because they ultimately had to exist outside online social media, where the natural disasters actually happened. Bendito’s prints transcend the horror of the events depicted in the original photographs. Presented in the gallery, they provide a monument to mourn, remember, honor and reflect on what happened in New Orleans, Haiti, Tohoku, and wherever natural disasters strike. Like Michelangelo’s Pieta (1499) or Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982), they offer a poignant memorial of man’s fragile yet inexorable place in the world.
Catherine Dossin is an art historian. Originally from France she received a Master’s degree from the Sorbonne and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She is an associate professor at Purdue University, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary art in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Her research is rooted in historiography and geopolitics with an emphasis on transnational dialogues. Her first book, Geopolitics of the Western Art World, 1940s-1980s, to be published by Ashgate in 2014, challenges the New
014