Posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 - 11:33 am:

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What is sad about this town is many of the anti war contingent seems to not support the troops.

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Posted on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - 12:09 pm:

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Jonathan Allen

Allen’s paintings incorporate images from popular culture, politics and mass media. The figures in these works are appropriated from newspaper photographs. With their traced outlines they seem to float as apparitions over dreamlike landscapes.

A. J. Bocchino

Bocchino collects headlines from the New York Times which he organizes chronologically, and color-codes according to subject, (yellow for political issues, red for wars and conflicts, etc.) For the Headlines exhibition he covered the largest wall of the gallery with a decade of headlines, the different colors revealing the kinds of stories that led the news coverage on each day. Standing in front of the wall, the viewer confronts his own recent history.

Brendan Carroll

Carroll’s installation comprises a grid of Polaroids on which he types passages from contemporary literature by Tim O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy and Thom Jones. While the pictures appear to be snapshots of soldiers in battle, they are actually scenarios constructed by the artist. The pairing of texts and photographs blurs the lines between fact and fiction, the verbal and the visual.

Mike Estabrook

Estabrook’s work examines sources of information. To make his painting, Disaster at 1:47 a.m. , May 4, 2003 , he performed an internet Google image search using only the word “disaster.” He replicated the page of thumbnail results in a large-scale painting that not only provides a permanent record of actual disasters, but is also a picture of how we gather information in the digital age. His video, Yllier'O Llib (2005), is a 9 minute loop of all of the footage taken from one episode of “The O'Reilly Factor” in which Bill O'Reilly speaks directly to the camera, played backwards, with a random list of perverse suggestions scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Estabrook renders the media icon unintelligible and subverts the fear of subliminal messages.

Joy Garnett

Garnett collects images from various internet sources and uses them to make paintings. Her Strange Weather series includes images of Hurricane Katrina. By removing pictures from their sources, and transforming them into sublime landscape paintings, she explores the malleability of media images and their constantly changing meanings. Her own appropriation and reuse of these images underscores the distortion and manipulation of images by the media and the government.

Laura Greengold

Greengold’s Television Paintings are installed like a bank of televisions, suggesting a media control room or an electronics store. Each painting reproduces the image of a person taken from a television program that Greengold videotaped and scanned. She made each painting in a single session, painting in lines from top to bottom, imitating the way images are loaded onto a screen.

Curt Ikens

Ikens has created an interactive installation for this exhibition, arranging twelve bales of shredded newspaper to form two blocky chairs. Each bale contains one month’s issues of The Newark Star-Ledger. Each day of the exhibition a fresh issue of the current day’s Star-Ledger is provided for visitors to peruse and share from the comforts of the bale chairs. The visitor can absorb the current news while literally sitting on the old news. Similarly, in One Week’s News, information from a finite period of time is rendered inaccessible, addressing the deterioration of information.

Peter Jacobs

Jacobs has used the newspaper as raw material for his project, The Collage Journal. On March 31, 2005, he created a 9 x 12 inch collage from that day’s New York Times and he continued the process daily for an entire year. For this exhibition, Jacobs has scanned his original collages to create facsimiles of his sketchbook journals. Visitors are invited to look through the journals, adding another layer of personal interpretation.

Hiroshi Kumagai

In his Xerograph Green Series, Kumagai explores the relationship between war imagery and popular culture. His Japanese anime-inspired figures play against a camouflage background, enacting scenes of death, disaster, heroism and camaraderie. His Instant Message series examines how this shorthand “language” has changed the way we send, receive and interpret information. In this work the abbreviation OMG (“Oh my God”) takes on a new meaning, with an implied association of religion—in this case, Christianity and Islam. The pseudo-Arabic font suggests the idea of stereotypes and how they can influence our perceptions. Seen against a backdrop of camouflage, these instant messages hint at the background of war that hovers on the edge of any discussion about these two religions.

Jason Lujan

Lujan examines the concept of “Homeland Security” as it relates to the Native American struggle with colonization in the Americas. For his project, Selections form the Native American Activist Handbook, he downloaded pages from U.S. Army training manuals available on the internet. By changing the language to imply that the “good guys” are American Indians, and the “enemy” or “terrorist invader” is the United States government, Lujan transforms the material into a training manual for Native Americans. The work questions the concept of “homeland,” and suggests that the meaning changes according to who defines it.

Julie Peppito

Peppito’s work often explores the intersection of consumer culture and politics, and includes a range of personal and universal symbols. She describes We work hard not to see that we are criminals as a narrative about the cycle of violence and how we avoid responsibility for it by “demonizing others, buying needless stuff, watching TV and working hard.” In Mr. Cheney’s Accident, (a drawing created specifically for this exhibition), Peppito addresses a recent headline that raised questions about the timing of news stories. The text accompanying the work splices together news reports of the incident with statistics of deaths and casualties resulting from the war in Iraq.

Henry Sanchez

Sanchez appropriates images from political advertisements, campaign flyers and newspapers to make digital prints. He obscures the faces and other parts of the figures by adorning them with glitter, attempting to reveal the sense of adoration and mystery he finds in political flyers and mailings. The use of glitter to mask the features of politicians creates an interesting tension between glamour and mystery, embellishment and disguise.

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

For her photographic series Backyards, Skvirsky takes images of ordinary Iraqi civilians in moments of prayer, and imagines them performing their gestures on American soil. Using actors to re-enact poses taken directly from news photographs, she places them in the suburban landscape. These works examine how meaning is altered by removing the context of war. In Blowback, victims of war and disasters are symbolically represented as zombies, slowly appearing in the landscape of Central Park. The soundtrack, sampled and composed from classic horror movie tracks, emphasizes the characters’ truncated physical movements. The work explores the xenophobia that has become a mainstay in the news and internalized in our culture.

Lynn Sullivan

Sullivan’s ongoing sculptural project, My Falluja recreates the gestures and positions of Iraqi citizens portrayed in the New York Times coverage. Since 2003 she has been collecting articles about the Iraq war. Using paper pulp made from the newsprint, she fashions anonymous monochromatic figures that mimic poses from the articles. She pairs these painted pulp figures with newspaper clippings she saved. A short video presents the acts of cutting, saving and reading these clippings, and examines the relationship between the figures and their ultimate source.

Carlo Vialu

Vialu’s series, We Will Be Greeted with Flowers (a Case of Myopia) takes its inspiration from words uttered by Paul Wolfowitz before the war in Iraq. Vialu assembles pieces of flower jigsaw puzzles in the shapes of weapons and other symbols of war. According to the artist, these works reflect the myopic view of the Bush administration that resulted in miscalculations and misrepresentations. The artist has also created an outdoor installation of a bed of artificial flowers arranged in the shape of an AK-47. The layering of flowers and military imagery calls to mind the idea of public memorials, and juxtaposes material associated with pleasure and materials associated with war.

Amy Wilson

Wilson’s work borrows texts from both right- and left-leaning political sources along with the artist’s journal entries, arranged as an ongoing narrative. She also incorporates imagery from newspaper cartoons of the 1800s and early 1900s, and figures that recall outsider art. She has observed that most viewers skim the texts in a way similar to watching television news. The subjective leanings of the viewer often color the meaning of the work.

Cheryl Yun

Yun is interested in how we, as a consumerist society, try to meet our spiritual and emotional needs by purchasing goods we think we need. The Cheryl Yun Collection is a presentation of image-based lingerie and handbags fashioned from newspaper photographs. Yun scans and manipulates images to create a rich visual “fabric.” The objects simultaneously mirror and subvert fashion and consumer culture. She displays her “products” in an installation that replicates a retail space.

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