Image Field: 

Artist Statement

Our history is made from people recording stories according to his/her particular viewpoint, so everything we learn from history is a tainted version of reality.

This body of work is about war. The process involves gathering numerous photographs from the web dating back to the American Civil War through to the current Iraq War, and then combining them to create a montage. The result is a new image that embodies war’s timeless persecution of humanity.

The juxtaposition of old and new immediately becomes apparent, yet remains subtle enough for the viewer to believe he/she is looking at a “real” image.  For many of the images, it is not clear which wars make up the sum of the picture. This ambiguity allows one to ponder the ubiquitous themes that characterize all wars. The need and method for domination have not evolved, only the tools to aid this have.

This series is not only a comment on war, but experiments with the concept of time periods and their technologies. The collection is viewed on an old 1970s slide projector against a white screen of 6 feet by 6 feet. Showing low fidelity images gathered from the postmodern Internet with a high fidelity modern medium—the transparency—creates tension punctuated by an ambiguous auditory reloading of the slide projector’s images...or artillery? It is the Internet, which enables people to research the follies of the past and has been the facility with which this commentary was created. Other advances in technology, however, have only served man’s obsession with his own destruction.