This week on the Flat File we feature two projects included in our new exhibition, Internal Ballistics: The Photography of Deborah Bay and Sabine Pearlman, and projects that compliment it. This two-person exhibition showcases the discomfiting beauty of morally fraught objects: bullets.

We are excited to kick off this exhibition by featuring Ammo. For this project, guest photographer Sabine Pearlman traveled to Switzerland in 2012. She worked inside of a WWII bunker with a munitions specialist to bisect historic bullets and then took cross-section photographs. Her images reveal the rarely seen interior engineering of deadly objects. Seeing each compartment of the bullets as if in a diagram, the viewer is compelled to admire their craftsmanship. The antiseptic white ground of the photographs removes these machined objects from their messy human entanglements. The many varieties of bullets she photographed for the project remain unidentified, further encouraging a willful ignorance of violence. This aesthetic appreciation for the bullets intrigued Pearlman, and Ammo complicates the experience of visual admiration.

from Ammo © Sabine Pearlman

Exhibition dates – February 4-March 31, 2014

Reception with the artists – Friday, February 21, 6-8pm

Artist talk – Saturday, February 22, 2-3pm

Gallery hours – Tuesday-Saturday 11-5, Sunday 12-5, and by appointment

Gallery address – 116 E Yanonali St, Santa Barbara Funk Zone

from Ammo © Sabine Pearlman

Images in Ammo are 24″x24″ archival pigment prints in editions of 10. Prints are $2,200 each. Please contact the gallery at 805.637.3898 or gallery@wall-spacegallery.com with any questions or to purchase prints.

About the artist

Sabine Pearlman was born and raised in Austria. She moved to the US in 2004, and today lives and works in Los Angeles. As a photographer, she strives to create a poetry of images by synergizing the “big picture” with the small details. Educated at Pratt Institute, Otis College of Art and Design and Santa Monica College, Sabine’s work has been exhibited at numerous galleries nationally and internationally.