The inspiration and development of the Prichard Art Gallery’s latest exhibit, “Real and Implied,” did not arrive instantly.
“I had seen Suzanne’s photographs more than two years ago and was really taken. I started thinking ‘How do you put that in with something else?’” said Roger Rowley, director of the Prichard Art Gallery. “Then I saw ‘The Artificial Killing Machine’ and that notion of a different type of war, a way of minimizing what we are doing to soldiers, immediately I thought ‘OK, there is something there.’”
“Real and Implied” features four main exhibits covering the subjects of war and technology. Visitors of the gallery are first introduced to a looping video of dance group ELEVENPLAY + Rhizomatiks Research’s “24 Drones,” which portrays several dancers choreographed together with an army of aerial drones.
“For me that’s kinda like a setup,” Rowley said. “It’s kind of wonderful, awe inspiring and elegant.”
Though he said he believes visitors will also find the video powerful, he said he finds an ostensible presence of danger within the production.
“Immediately there is some sense of danger, some sense that something could go wrong between the dancers and the flying drones. There is a sense of an edge to it,” he said. “To me, that sets up the notion that we think of technology as a remote thing … how you proceed through the exhibit brings the potential danger of technology into sharper focus.”
Following the video, visitors are shown Jonathan Moore’s “Artificial Killing Machine,” an installation of several toy cap guns rigged to a computer monitoring all U.S. global drone strikes. When a strike is reported, one of the cap guns fires and a “receipt” detailing the strikes targets and estimated casualties is printed.
“Now we are talking about drones, but in a very different context,” Rowley said. “Yet there is still a feeling of the technology being very remote. There’s no threat of a bomb strike happening across the street in Moscow, it’s nothing that impacts our lives.”
After “Artificial Killing Machine,” gallery attendees head upstairs to take in Rosemarie Fiore’s “Gunflake Series,” a series of gun rubbings configured in the shape of snowflakes.
Fiore conceived the idea for snowflake-shaped gun rubbing after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that shook her native home, New York City. In retrospect, she sees the rubbing as a reflection of the anxiety she felt following the attacks, especially given that she was away from New York studying art in New Mexico, she said.
“I was away from my community, thinking about war and terrorism,” Fiore said. “I went to a local gunshop in Roswell, New Mexico, and borrowed some guns for the rubbings. It became a peaceful object over a violent object.”
Although now the correlation between the rubbings and the collective nation-wide paranoia following 9/11 is obvious, at the time it did not occur to Fiore where her inspiration for the rubbings came from.
“When I was making the rubbings I didn’t realize I was making something related to the war,” she said. “I was away from my community. I was too close to understand why I was doing it. It wasn’t until further self-reflection that I understood it’s inspiration.”
The last piece of the exhibit, Suzanne Opton’s “Soldier” series, depicts Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans laying their heads down on a table in massive photographic prints. The series is meant to offer an intimate portrait of the effects of war on those that fight.
Rowley feels that the portraits do an incredible job of portraying the soldiers in an often unseen light. The high-resolution images reveal details often hidden, such as hints of acne testifying to the youth of those sent to fight overseas.
“It’s the soldiers that get sent off to fight the war. We got generals and presidents making decisions remotely about these things,” he said. “The trickle down effect is that we are sending out these individuals who have to do whatever strategy and tactics we say. They bear the history of that in the expressions you see in those pictures.”
Rowley said the correlation between remote decision making and its effects on real people is what tied the exhibit together.
“Real and Implied” can be viewed until Jan. 28, 2017.
Sam Balas can be reached at [email protected]