Bomb Bloom renders an internet image of a bomb explosion near Kabul, Afghanistan in a landscape of living flowers. Planted in a grid — mimicking a printer’s halftone dot or the color bands of a low-resolution digital image — perennials of different species and colors slowly grow into a legible image of a large detonation, like a photograph emerging in a darkroom developer bath. The image takes two to six weeks to fully appear.
Viewers at ground level see only a dense, seemingly irregular arrangement of flowers. Only from above — from a high enough vantage point — does the explosion become readable.
The piece draws on the aerial logic of warfare itself. WWII bomber pilots couldn’t assess their accuracy without cameras shooting aerial views of their targets; contemporary warfare renders the landscape symbolically on a control panel, or delegates the act entirely to a drone. The source photograph was taken during an air strike in Kabul that allegedly killed civilians at a social gathering.
Proposal for a public project, live perennials, 40′ × 40′, 2003. Exhibited as an installation at Brown University’s Bell Gallery, 2004.
