Yawn

Yawn  copper wire and approx. 2,400 nameless dog tags  59x79  SOLD

An installation I did for the Almost Famous group show at Reynolds Gallery that is up until July 12th.

This is a continuation of the ...Over project that I've been working on. While looking at photos of my last installation, I started to notice a formal connection to the shimmering quality of the steel dog tags and the chaotic dance of television static.  I've also been thinking about the way we interact with war secondhand as American television/internet audience members. So this piece became an attempt to address the mediation of war and what I have seen as the overall American reaction to it - tuned out and bored with it. The proportions and shape of this piece reference television sets from the 60's, which alludes to the legacy of providing the American public with a filtered and stripped down version of what American wars are like.

...Over (silent version)

...Over (silent version)  3,000 blank dog tags with copper wire  240 x 54

Wee toddlers...

Wee Toddlers...  text stamped into wall  approx. 6x9

Here's another wall piece that I did. This time I was bit more conscious about where I installed it, although I'm sure the VCU Fine Arts Building stairwell is not the best venue for it.

Some of my classmates have been kind enough to inform me that even though these text pieces are hard to see, once you know they are there, it's hard not to look at them. I like that aspect of the work very much. I find that my past is something that's also invisible that constantly reaches out for my attention. I constantly think of the things I witnessed and it's nice to have made a piece that has a similar silent, nagging, insistent presence. Hopefully it serves to shed some light on what it's like to be caught up in the largely unnoticed wars we have fought and continue to fight abroad.

For clarity, here's the text:

WEE TODDLERS DON T CRY IMMEDIATELY

WHEN YOU DROP THEM DOWN A FLIGHT

OF STAIRS I KNOW THAT NOW

AT THE TIME IT SEEMED LIKE A

GOOD IDEA FOR ONE TO CARRY THE

OTHER BUT IN THE END ALL THOSE

STAIRS AND ALL THAT WEIGHT GOT

THE BEST OF IT  EVENTUALLY IT

DID CRY  EVEN THOUGH IT WAS A

PAIN IT WAS A RELIEF

BUT NOW I WONDER IF IT EVER

LEARNED ITS OWN NAME

I WONDER WHAT YOU CALL IT

The Oldest People I Ever Met

The Oldest People I Ever Met  text stamped onto wall  approx. 5x18 inches

Last semester I realized that painting pieces about my experiences overseas limited me in what I could get across. Therefore, I decided to explore these feelings in writing. I have found that I'm getting more and more comfortable with confronting some of the tough stuff, and I feel good about that.

Much like the act of sanding in my wood pieces, stamping each letter into the wall with the reinforced steel metal stamp is a meditative act that demands discipline and concentration. As the hammer strikes the metal pin, an echoed, pounding sound bounces off the walls and reminds me of the usually off-target, intermittent indirect fire that was periodically lobbed onto the bases we occupied. A little reminder that they hadn't forgotten about us.

The subject of these works is the loss of innocence. We soldiers certainly lost a fair amount of ours as the bulk of us were just kids in our own right and had never seen any combat. But we weren't the only ones growing up. I guess everyone was gets older fairly quickly in places like that, but the children over there really had to grow up fast. I felt they had decades on all of us.

I haven't studied enough poetry to understand how best to write these passages. I'm hoping to go to a workshop at some point through the Veterans Writing Workshop (http://veteranswriting.org/) in DC to tweak them and get some other ideas going about ways to tackle this subject matter within the medium of writing literature.

However, there were some things that I tried to keep in mind while making these like how the text is basically invisible until you get right up to it; the lack of punctuation and what how that effects the read of it; the font and the connotations it might have (this is pretty subtle, but if you've had dog tags before, then you might recognize it); and the way in which the lines are broken up to affect the pace of the read. I also wanted the tone of them to be somewhat matter-of-fact; to be dry and distant. I think this does two things a) it pits a sympathy in the reader for these kids' plight against a seemingly unsympathetic disconnectedness in the author and b) it uses the same simple vernacular that we used overseas. By the end of our tour a lot of us were pretty disillusioned about the true nature of man, about our "good guy" status, and all of that and ultimately it affected everything; even the way we communicated. Sentences got short and to-the-point with plenty of cursing to drive the point home. And dwelling on things or "bitching and moaning" didn't really help, so you speak your piece and then kindly "shut the fuck up". No one wanted to hear you verbalize what they were trying not to think about. In the short term, it's a pretty effective system. But over time it eats you up.

The reproduction of these passages may be difficult to decipher, so below you'll find what they say. However, it's important for me to point out that the high contrast black-and-white nature of the font  below is antithetic to what I tried to do in the actual work. It being a pain in the ass to read on the wall is an important part of the concept of this piece.

The passage on the left reads:

THE OLDEST PEOPLE I EVER MET

WERE THESE THREE IRAQI KIDS

NONE OF EM COULD HAVE BEEN MORE

THAN 12 YEARS OLD BUT THEY HAD

EONS IN THEIR EYES

THEY WOULD SELL US EVERYTHING

UNDER THE SUN – PORN SADDAM-ERA

UNIFORMS LOOTED ROMAN COINS-

THEY DEALT IN IT ALL AFTER WE

PULLED OUT OF THE BASE THEY

CALLED HOME THEY WERE DISPATCHED

AND IF THEY DIDNT SEEM SO

ANCIENT I WOULD SAY THEY

DIED TOO YOUNG

The passage on the right reads:

DO CHILDREN NEED THEIR HEADS

TURNS OUT THEY DO

THEY USE THEM TO PICK SIDES

FOR SOME REASON THEY PICKED OURS

THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING

war painting

war painting  copper wire and 90 stamped, stainless steel dogtags  approx. 48x50

I've been experimenting with text lately in my work. I feel that in some cases, certain mediums can get you closer to what you want to say than others. So I guess this piece is pointing out that painting in oil (as I have been doing for a few years now) is not an ideal medium for what I'm trying to do in terms of making work about my experiences overseas. But I'll qualify this by saying that I feel limited in oil painting and painting in general because of what I'm trying to say with it. Others may find painting to be the perfect medium for saying what they want to say. And indeed it's an amazing medium with many possibilities  However, when it comes to how and what I wish to communicate, painting just isn't doing it. And so, for the time being, I've moved on to more sculptural/installation projects.

I ordered a metal stamp kit and about 100 of the tags off Amazon. The text I used comes from the color names that oil paint manufacturers use. Names like "burnt umber" and "permanent green light" conjure up so many images from my time in the military. I get flashes of charred remains or the dancing shades of green of NVGs. The use of wire is a nod to IEDs and the way in which our "enemies" communicated with us. And of course the dogtags have their own history and significance. Light, shadow, and subtle movement also plays a part in this piece.

Until January 25th or so, this piece a few others of mine as well as some of my very talented friends' work will be up at Plant Zero on the southside. If you haven't seen it, you should check it out. The show is called "Good and Good for You". It's free and M-F it's open from 9am to 5pm.

This semester I was awarded a VCUArts research grant in order to expand this project. The final result should be about 5,000 dogtags or so. However, the text will most likely be from conversations I have with my army buddies and other veterans. My goal is to have the project completed and the venue where it will hang worked out by the end of next semester.

Ground to Pieces (Lesson 1)

Ground to Pieces (Lesson 1) dimensions of room approx. 10x15 feet, rubble, wood, paper, duct tape

I'm not sure exactly how to categorize this work, but I'll do my best to describe it. I had been gathering concrete from demolished buildings and asphalt this semester for what I imagined would be a static installation of Arabic text in a large room written in rubble. I hoped that the text would write out a sincere apology to the people that I harmed directly or indirectly while deployed in Iraq. It was important to use the physical language of a destroyed urban environment (chunks of buildings and roads) to write this message as this was the only language I really learned while in Mosul and Tall'afar. But what I would say and how this message might reach the people it was intended for were (and are) two very large obstacles to deal with. I have spent years wrestling with what I might tell these people whose lives and country I took part in altering/up-ending/terrorizing, and I am still at a loss. So I decided that rather than translate words that fail in my own language into a language I don't even know, my time would be best used by first learning Arabic. My thought is that between these two languages, I might be able to find the right words.

So in a small critique room I poured out my rubble onto the floor, took off my shoes, and spent roughly seven hours pushing around the material into the form of letters of the Arabic alphabet as well as writing the alphabet on paper over and over. It was tiring and a bit painful, but I felt that any tiny bit of suffering was appropriate to what I was doing - a mild form of self-flagellation to help pay for my sins, so to speak. I'm ashamed to admit that I spent eleven months in a country and interacted with its people daily, and I know only bits and pieces of its language. It's one of those insane realities of war. At the time it seemed that the language of aggression, intimidation, and terror often made other forms of communication seemingly unnecessary and cumbersome, especially when the flow of information was dominantly headed in one direction. I don't want to get on a political rant here, but it seemed that this form of (mis)communication was the policy of those in charge at the highest level. And it doesn't take much research on the Iraq War to realize that this way of doing things has cost all of us dearly.