Mathieu Asselin: Portraits of a Tornado Path

Mathieu Asselin “Portraits of a Tornado Path”

Exhibition is on view at ArtistsWanted Gallery (25-25 44th Drive, LIC 11101)
29 June - 31 July 2012

On May 22^nd 2011, a one-mile-wide multiple-vortex tornado drove through the city of Joplin, Missouri. It was the deadliest tornado in the United States since a storm destroyed Woodward in Oklahoma in 1947 The Joplin-tornado killed 161 people, obliterated or maimed 8 000 buildings, and caused $ 2.8 billion in damages.

What had been a familiar American landscape with its ubiquitous single family houses, restaurants, strip malls, cars and car dealers had been transformed into an apocalyptic landscape. Joplin had become a reminder of the forces that turn the familiar into chaos, forces that are in reality never too far from us.

Mathieu Asselin traveled to Joplin the week after the storm. He wanted to document the new relief of the landscape. Mathieu wanted to find the expression in the faces of those people who had experienced that the notion of control over our lives is just that: a mere notion.

Mathieu used the light of the battery power flashes to center on the subjects and isolate them from their environment.

photo Lauren Silberman