New Show opening August 14th at Cafe Racer

I've made a change of my plan. I can't work on this project right now. It's so sad and since I haven't been too happy lately the addition of working on this has sunk me lower than I thought possible in the summer. I also didn't feel right about rushing this work to finish it by the show deadline. I will pick this back up as soon as I feel healthier again. So for the show I am switching back to some drawings and paintings I had been working on before this project came to me. At least this way my work on the walls won't make Kurt's customers cry.

(This is a work still in progress of The Spiral Minaret of the Great Mosque in Samarra. It is something of an indication of the direction the work is going)

Most of the work relates to the devastating toll of the Iraq War in terms of Iraqi citizens and culture. This is a major departure for me artistically; I have never done work with political content. The majority of my work has been very personal, and I suppose this is as well at a certain level but via sympathetic feeling and reaction rather than any personal experience whatsoever.

I am generally so absorbed in exploring my own issues that I would never think to make any sort of altruistic statement or protest through my work. I initially stumbled across my subject by accident. I had been doing loads of research trying to find direction for my thesis, which usually devolved into my looking for my favorite works of art because looking at them made me happy but I pretended in my head that it was for research. I have always especially loved the art that originated in what is now Iraq: art from Ur, Uruk, Sumer, Babylon, Nimrud, Islam.

As I was hunting for my favorites I kept discovering that many of them had been stolen or damaged or destroyed since the Iraq War began in 2003. I then wanted to find out what has been lost and what remains intact.

I started to feel strange about being so concerned about the loss of art and architecture when so many people have been killed. I began researching how many Iraqi civilians had died, I had already heard reports of close to 300,000 but wanted to know if that was accurate and how that number was reckoned. In all my research the database of Iraq Body Count was consistently cited as the reliable list of identified deaths. When I read how many were on the database and how many more were estimated dead I was sickened. The only way I can describe how I reacted when first (and still) reading the Iraq Body Count database is to compare it to the reaction of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars when Alderaan was destroyed by the Death Star "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

When I get an idea for a body of work I usually see the finished project then have a flash of a high-speed sequence of each element of the work clicking into their proper spatial relationship. This is what happened here: I wanted to black gesso over white gesso on paper and board. On that I would make drawings of compromised artifacts or architecture, but instead of lines or shading I would carve the image out using the names of killed Iraqi citizens. So far it is coming together well with the visual and contextual impact being what I imagined.

Some may find this art offensive or heavy-handed or insensitive. I apologize to any who find it to be any of those, I mean for this to express my sorrow at this destruction of so many lives and the culture of the place they live.

My primary research sources have included Iraq Body Count, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/.
I think that being aware of the frightening numbers of Iraqi civilians killed is very important for US citizens right now as we near this presidential election. There is no true count yet but Iraq Body Count has documented approximately 90,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. The true count is exponentially higher:

"This is a list of all named or partially identified individuals in the IBC database as of Saturday, 26th July 2008, together with some of the personal details that are known about them. This list is constantly being updated. The latest version of this file can always be obtained from http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/download/ibc-individuals.php Concerned citizens and advocacy groups have for several years drawn attention to Iraqi victims of the war in public readings and displays using compilations of names drawn from Iraq Body Count and other sources. In any use of these names please give due honour to the as-yet unidentified dead who are not in this list, and whose numbers far exceed the named or partially identified victims. For every identified individual on the current list there are another 21 confirmed Iraqi civilians killed for whom we do not have identifying information. In contrast, virtually every coalition soldier who has been killed can be identified by name and other biographical information.
There is no organised effort to name all victims of the war. Only when all have been identified and duly recorded can there be any talk of respecting their memory. To those who knew and loved and miss them, Iraq Body Count offers its condolences." -part of the explanation at the top of the list of names in the Iraq Body Count database.