GwPow (Gulf War Prisoners of War)
Sparks of action, wartime verve, children sent out for something beyond their years and come back aged and harried if at all. GwPOW is a look back at the Gulf War, its many iconographies, ironies, and consequences on the young soldiers it conscripted, using found objects and war photographs. I want to explore the cognitive confusion I faced at the time when I was in my late teens, looking at how children are forced by war into things they shouldn’t have to experience by juxtaposing that childhood innocence with the brutality of conflict. The installation is to be based around a room that mixes the concepts of obstacle courses and arcade games, superheroes and candied beads, with scaffolding and blocks arranged in deliberate ways reminiscent of their aesthetics alongside paintings that emphasize the therapeutic process of working through the horrors of war. Paintings showcase sketched out soldiers wielding super-heroics and power ups to demonstrate the transient, transformative nature of life both during and after war, how perceptions transmute and change. The work constructs canvas collages to interrogate conflicts of identity, fighting and surviving at an age when you should be free to explore and play, contrasting the recreation of new media with its capacity for propagating harrowing events to that effect.
The exhibition's paintings (subcollected under the title: PowerUps) all place special importance on the sensibilities of the early 90s with their highly saturated pops of color and GI Joe inspired figures. A toyetic glee, juvenile and vivid, is clear in their inspirations, some taking a page out of comic book heroes and villains ("Omega", "Fist", "Laser") or reminding of the secret moves many an arcade player desperately maneuvered their fingers to execute ("Mental, "Magnet") while others like "Saber" reference particularly storied pieces of nerdom. These silly, spirited hues are rendered all the more jarring by the contrasting black obelisks and white splashes that snake in and out of the painting frames—sometimes spearing through photo realistic images of Desert Storm artifacts like medals, pocketbooks, first aid kits, etc. In the disconnect of weathered canvases displaying pencil drawn soldiers with brightly fantastical weaponry is the central thesis of the overall exhibition, war and its various dreads poeticized as electrical spectacle as the costs incurred scurry just beneath.
Further paintings, "F1rst A1d" and "J3t S3t G0", "Galaga" and "Risk", also reinforce this theme in how they're arranged. The former ones draped in military tent coverings, the first two dappled with old style detergent stains, a first aid kit, a splintered off piece of an Iraqi jet. The latter dotted with toy soldiers and plane sketches in childish battle formations. This in turn serves to emphasize the innocent aspects of the work in literally embracing the dressings of the Gulf War with a youthful embrace of textures and detail. Similarly does this apply to the myriad found objects sourced for the exhibition, accumulating a bevy of toys, locker boxes, statuettes, colorful pillowcases, photographs, netting, and tools to display the relative mundanity of the wartime day to day, while other routine items have been transformed through brilliant beads and vibrant yarn wefts to emphasize the dissonance of joyful innocence and clinical battle sadly crisscrossing.
