I work from historical and contemporary film and photographic sources to create narrative compositions of significant social and political events, the tragedies, histories and sometime comedies of the 20th and 21st-centuries.
The work employs the compositional techniques of history paintings – “story painting” – using a palette2 of electronically manipulated documentary fragments of people, architecture and landscapes, meticulously selected from stills, photographs, crime scene documents, maps and street views to create the final tableaux.
Web https://gordonbelray.com
Email gordon.belray@utoronto.ca
La Jornada del Muerto
Details from La Jornada del Muerto
The Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki
Hiroshima
Dr. Stangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb
2018
129″x 105”
A reconstruction of Target 384 (a Soviet ICBM complex) from numerous stills beginning with the final frame of Bomber commander Major T. J. Kong riding the bomb to its detonation triggering the Doomsday Machine.
For a year, rumours had circulated among high-level Western leaders – – that the Soviet Union was at work on the “ultimate weapon”. A doomsday device. Intelligence sources traced the site of the top-secret project – – to the foggy wasteland below the Arctic peaks of the Zarkov islands. What they were building, or why they chose such a remote place, – – no one could say.
Woman by house in Chernobyl
Three Mile Island
Outakes – Crew of the Enola Gay and Boxscar
Outtakes – crew of the Enola Gay and Boxscar from Gordon Belray on Vimeo.