Artists' Statement

"WARHEADS"

The underlying images in this series were originally created in 1991 during each of the 43 days of the Gulf War. Having never fully recovered from the Vietnam era, this new war stunned me. What could I do? I was too old and too embedded in my life to drop everything and run to "the front" to document the war, as my photojournalistic "voice" suggested. Instead, by sitting on my knees in front of the television, for each day the war, I "documented" the war through the eyes of the public…only being able to see the faces of war correspondents and commentators, because no media (no "embedded" journalists) were allowed "on the front".

This censorship appalled me, as I so vividly remembered daily footage from the jungle floor of Vietnam which my family and I watched every night at 6:00pm while we ate our dinner and watched our soldiers getting shot by snipers in a guerilla war they could not win.

As this censorship was part of a larger denial campaign, my anti-war artwork was slow to receive any attention. Eventually, individual photos from the series were exhibited at the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Artemesia, and the Houston Center for Photography, among others. The entire body of work was eventually shown at the Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, seven years after the war ended.

Many artists struggled with how to express their reaction to 911. (my husband and I created a satirical 3-D sound and photo piece of Las Vegas's knee-jerk response) and then again, to another unbelievable march to war….and this one was not going to be a mere 43 days!

I knew I had to respond, artistically, and after a while I thought about using my original Gulf War prints, re-working them, much like a painter will re-work old canvases. I knew I wanted to distress the surface of the print somehow, and tried razor blades, and a few other tearing tools. Then I remembered one of my favorite tools for creativity : Potassium Ferrycyanide, a reducer that I used in my black and white work.

By throwing bleach on the original print, yellows, oranges, red, and white layers of the print emulsion were conveniently produced to conveys the increased and prolonged violence, through suicide and other bombings, that this war has produced, and is still igniting.

Some of the faces are the same, and some are different. They only represent the establishment's "face" that is put on a violent situation. The WARHEADS that report on the war are normally safe in their TV studios. These images show the white media elite, politicians and others, being exposed to an imagined physic "overlay" of explosive fire and mayhem. My hope is that seeing these images may slightly rock and remind us of the security blanket we live in, safe, thousands of miles away from the battlefield. Maybe it will also remind us of the death toll still being tallied.