feather bleached in peroxide;

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For the 'Violent-object' group exhibition we were asked to investigate the tension between design and violence and express
our interpretation of it.

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Throughout history, various narratives have connected violence with the concept of beauty, from the Trojan War, set off by a beauty contest between three goddesses, to several beauty-obsessed stepmothers in front of a flirtatious mirror. 
According to Greek mythology, the source of the breathtaking eye pattern on the peacock's tail is the monstrous giant with hundreds of eyes, Argus, who was the faithful watchman of Zeus’s vindictive wife, Hera. After Argus was killed by Hermes, Hera paid tribute to him by transferring his eyes to the Peacocks tail. 
The connection between the story of the gods and the beautiful bird ignited our desire to challenge the beauty of its feathers and reexamine the visual perception of a violent deed. When a colorful feather is shown in all its glory, the only way to sabotage it is by disrupting the nucleus of its being. 
To that end, we specifically needed the color white, which in any other scenario would have been interpreted as surrender, paleness or innocence. In the colorful context of the feather, the bleached white becomes violent and destructive, implanting a component of effacement and sterilization in the feather. Blank seeks to remind us that the definition of violence is context dependent, and perhaps even shirks the clear synchronization between violence and its visual representation.

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www.violentobject.com