Buffalo-based artist Robert Hirsch’s pictorial sculpture curates and re-imagines key components from historical and original images to explore our collective memory involving loss, popular culture, religion, tragedy, and wickedness over the past four centuries. Each glass jar contains the same picture, printed twice on a black field, which lets the image to be viewed from multiple viewpoints.

Writes Hirsch, "Using the Shoah as its point of departure, World in a Jar is a free-form montage that rethinks the customary linear narrative format by presenting an archive of what I choose to remember, without attaching a fixed ending. It is a perpetual work in progress, recreating itself each time it is installed. It permits each photograph to not only present its own split-second historical reference, but also informs the context of the images surrounding it."

More about Robert Hirsch.

World in a Jar will be exhibited May 28 through June 6 in room 202 at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, in conjunction with the f295 Symposium and Media Tonic 3. A reception, free and open to the public, is scheduled for Friday, May 30 at 8:00, with Robert Hirsch in person.