Artist Krista Wortendyke '(re):media' Explosion Collages Examine Perceptions Of War (PHOTOS)

Artist Krista Wortendyke wants you to stop for a minute and rethink explosions.

In her collage series "(re:)media," Wortendyke examines the way imagery and information from photographs, movies, videogames, newspapers, and the Internet come together to form our perception of war.

"We have experiences from viewing images that are indistinguishable from physical experience," Wortendyke told The Huffington Post in an email. "My work is the exploration of the way these two worlds interact through images of war, specifically explosions ... because they are the most universal and most spectacular signifiers of war."

Relying solely on her imagination and hundreds of media sources, Wortendyke creates a unique war scene on a blank canvas using Photoshop layers, notes Wired.

"Unless we have been in combat, our only access to that experience is through the news, photographs, movies and videogames," Wortendyketold HuffPost.

The individual images can take anywhere from a few days to a few months to contruct.

If Wortendyke's spectacular explosions appeal to you, Israeli artist Eyal Gever's 3D catastrophic sculptures will also catch your eye.

Another incredible war simulation not to miss is artist Luke Jerram's data visualization sculpture that features the Hiroshima nuclear bomb explosion based on a 28 second sound file.

Check out a selection of Krista Wortendyke's explosive collages below.

Also on HuffPost:

Comments

[dawoudbey]

12:33 PM on 01/29/2012

Krista Wortendyke is making some of the most engaging and provocative work about our culture of violence, and the ways in which reality, media images and gaming culture become conflated in the public imagination. Great work Krista!

[smahl]

08:07 AM on 01/27/2012

so war is beautiful to this artist?
Really not seeing how taking the horror and destruction out of the originals and doing a rehash of a overused style is doing anything but making war acceptable. Which is something it should never be

[MrJ]

10:31 PM on 01/26/2012

Did Hockney invent collage? Sequential Art? Jeez, so much hatin' for someone's art. Maybe people should stop making ROCK music because its all been done before. Hip Hop too? Lighten up haters.

[bragladish]

11:10 AM on 01/25/2012

This is such a wannabe series... nice homage, knockoff, counterfeit of so many artists who have already ripped this technique... so, you put explosions in these images, big whoop, neither is the esthetic or the concept original. You are a hack!

[mandolino]

07:47 PM on 01/24/2012

Don't let the amateur critics bulldoze , Krista; your deeply interesting & well-wrought work takes more than a glance to assimilate -- the uncannily mild 'prettiness' aspect to essential violence doesn't, to me, seem overtly derivative.

[suddenfun]

05:33 PM on 01/24/2012

Eh...not so good...why is this in here at all...not very original and really rather mediocre...

[tlpfliger]

04:19 PM on 01/24/2012

...david hockney did this first (and much better) decades ago. shame on you.

[syllable]

04:30 PM on 01/24/2012

Photo collage was around before Hockney. All art is derivative

[jrb35]

06:03 PM on 01/24/2012

Hockney made "joiners" not collages. His photos were taken sequentially of a single event (e.g. a woman walking into a room and taking a seat) and then arranged so as to show a passage of time. Collages are entirely different.

[tlpfliger]

04:38 PM on 01/24/2012

...you're missing my badly stated point...hockney's photo-collages of several decades ago where he composed photographs together...to create a larger message.

[kateinnh]

05:19 PM on 01/24/2012

Totally agree. That was the first thing I thought. Hmmm, I wish David Hockney would have taken on this project. He would have captured the energy and angles much better. These seem flat.