Fruits of War

Cherry Bomb, from Sweet Blast, dye sublimation on polished aluminum, starting at $275, sweetblasts.com.

Matt McKee was flipping through a magazine when two ads caught his eye—one for lemon-scented dish soap, the other an antiwar public service announcement picturing a hand grenade. “The two images melded in my head, and I was driven into the studio,” he says. The result is Sweet Blast—a series of photographs of “commercially perfect” fruit, to which McKee attaches the fuse of a hand grenade in his Hyde Park studio. And he barely alters the images: “The food has already been so manipulated, between farming practices and commercial selections,” McKee says, “I didn’t feel the need to ‘cheat’ it that way.”