“5 Years” addresses issues of war, media, and social values.
On March 16, 2008, an army recruitment banner ad ran across the top of the web version of the New York Times article that commemorated the five-year anniversary of the US war in Iraq. Other advertisements for cars and tv shows were included on the page, as were photos of Abu Ghraib, US soldiers in Iraq, and explosions in Baghdad.
I printed and enlarged several pages of this article, and this cross-section of images, along with the text of the article, became a substructure over which I painted my own emotional response to the anniversary of the war. Fragments of image and text emerge through the application of paint, similar to the way news and awareness of the war bleed into the fabric of daily life. Isolated words or half-obscured images emerge as sub-themes of the paintings.
My goal with these paintings is to create an emotional connection to the Iraq war (and to the war as it manifests in Afghanistan, and to all wars) amid the impersonal statistical violence purveyed by media—this series of paintings is a human and humanizing response to the electric information and mechanical destruction which are a substructure of contemporary life.
“5 Years” is tangentially related to a poem-cycle called “Carbon Rings” I wrote between 2005 and 2008. Here are a few lines from “Carbon Rings”:
You and I are allotropes
of one another,
pterodactyls rise
from exhaust pipes
to the city sky,
I saw a thousand birds
fly through a thousand windows,
but really it was you.
