PETER HENNESSEY: MY HELL'S GATE
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My Hell's Gate
Peter Hennessey
Exhibition Dates: 5 February - 27 February, 2010
Opening 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.