Open-ended and off to Miami

As to the previously posted "'Terp" piece, here is the companion, seen side by side with its brother. Sometimes I worry too much about defining the purpose behind my work, but for these two I was painting them for a specific event (rather than a specific idea), that being the Aqua Art Fair in Miami this Dec.

The title of Blue and/on Green covers some of the implications of the content: i.e. fratricide and betrayal, contradictory and ambiguous relationships between NATO/ISAF and the Afghans who work with them.

If, in the very off-chance you find yourself in Miami between December 6-9, My work will be with the AWOL Gallery folk. I'll be there on the 7th and 8th (and maybe the 9th).

'Terp

Many of the 'Terps working with ISAF/NATO wear masks, bandanas to lessen the chance of attack to both themselves and their families. But not all of 'em.

I'm not gonna use a word like heroic; let's go with Ballsy. For example, this dude working with the Jarheads at CFC.

Also, I'm pretty fucking pleased with how this turned out. Puffy, shiny jackets take a bit of patience.

Morris nails it

Yesterday I was talking to the writer for my YYZ show essay. This is germane because it (sort of) signals the first time I've had to had a coherent sense of what this project has become. Sometimes "garage sale" seems the best way to describe it.

Last week, while reading Errol Morris' "Believing is Seeing", and specifically the chapter on Roger Fenton's Crimean War cannonball photo(s), I came across this gem:

"War is a peculiar thing. —Inaugurated by the whims of the few, affecting the fate of many. It is a difficult, if not impossible, thing to understand, yet we feel compelled to describe it as though it has meaning even virtue. It starts for reasons often hopelessly obscure, meanders on, then stops."

So I'm not sure if this show of mine is going to have coherence, but Morris, at least, seems to offer commonality with the idea that there's little coherence in a war zone, and that, perhaps it is a garage sale of competing ideas, images and possibilities that when taken from a distance form the kind of entity that you might pull over to the side of the road to peruse.