...of our sons and daughters

description

Of our sons and daughters... is a two-channel looping video installation, rear projected on two 40"x30" hanging sheets of mylar. Both video channels are entirely composed of collaged and animated found footage culled from youtube and the US Department of Defense website. All the footage appears to refer to the war in iraq. The piece recalls the "talking head" shot of news or documentary TV; however, the two interviewees - a male soldier (as indicated by the hint of camouflage) and a veiled female - have been excised from their respective backgrounds and deprived of voice. Their testimonies never end, never pause to allow for a new question, for dialogue. He is slowed down.She is sped up. The audio is completely non-diagetic: reverberating coins, shuffling paper, distant but insistent chimes.

 Behind the soldier is a swirling, almost ornamental, montage of scenes from the ground in iraq: both those scenes that loom large in the western popular imagination - night vision, burning skylines, burning cars, masked insurgents, desert -colored uniforms engulfed by desert-colored architecture - and those that don't - wounded civilians staring into the camera. The intensity of the background imagery renders the relationship between foreground and background equivalent, against the logic of the "talking-head" shot or of any portrait for that matter.

Behind the woman is a flat color giving her the appearance of a cut-out: white triangle on red square. The color of the background is red: the red of blood? the red of flags? The use of montage technique to address war has a history that stretches back to DaDa.

References to oppositional binary relationships pervade the piece, as they do the rhetoric of war ("with us or against us"): man/woman, soldier/civillian, visual excess/visual austerity West/East, speed/slowness, monochrome/ornament, presence/absence, foreground/background. However these implied binaries do not so much bolster each other up through negation as fade and blend into the same teeming plane of information.

 A final image ancestor haunts this piece: the defaced religious icon.