SINSYRIASLY YOURS...

Most recent feature article of my piece "SiNSYRIASLY YOURS..."

I'll never forget seeing my first set of Domino pieces laid out on the floor of my home when I was little and watching the stacked pieces knock against each other to fall in sequence. I don't ever recall learning the rules of the game but came to learn it by observing political events.

The Viet Nam War began while I was in grammar school and the term Domino Theory crept into common usage in the vernacular. The nightly news fed us a steady stream of our images on our black and white TV of exhausted soldiers and helicopters and damaged lives. On the home front I saw the war affect us at home as my father worried about my brother getting drafted to fight in a war that he knew well from the horrors of after having survived World War 2 which included the Siege of Warsaw when the Nazis invaded.

I lived on the cusps of the new American Reality of peace and stability and the emigre life of wartime refugees. Fortunately for me the war in Viet Nam ending before I reached drafting age and the memories could subside as well as any interest in politics. At that time the current of war shifted out of Southeast Asia to where it burned more brightly in the Middle East and what became news fodder was the conflict in Israel and Egypt and Palestine. Time Magazine was filled weekly with accounts of terrorist bus bombers and a rather pervasive guerrilla warfare which we really associated with Viet Nam although its precedent was well set with the O.S.S. and the early C.I.A.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria represented what we now know as a 20+ year war and conflict we have yet to see the truly terminated. From watching images of black rubber lifeboats and people of all ages wading ashore and leaving behind large hills of orange life preservers to newly pitched refugee camps. There are  now contained millions of the dispossessed within the confines of the camps.

Here are the numbers:

SYRIA.  6.848.865

AFGHANISTAN 2,840,672

SUDAN 2,372,656

MYANMAR 1,209,086

UKRAINE 8,046.560

For comparison purposes, this from BBC 

European Refugee Movements After World War 2

By Bernard Wasserstein

By 1959 some 900,000 European refugees had been absorbed by west European countries. In addition, 461,000 had been accepted by the USA, and a further 523,000 by other countries. But many 'hard-core' refugees still remained in camps. At that point the United Nations launched an ambitious effort to resolve the refugee problem once and for all.

World Refugee Year, in 1959-1960, was designed as a 'clear the camps' drive. It achieved some significant results - at any rate in Europe. By the end of 1960, for the first time since before World War Two, all the refugee camps of Europe were closed.

But the global refugee problem was far from solved. In Africa and Asia millions of fugitives from persecution, hunger, and natural disasters continued to scramble for secure homes. Europe, hitherto mainly an exporter of refugees, henceforth became a net importer. Today the United Nations estimates that over 17 million asylum seekers, refugees and stateless people are seeking homes worldwide.

At this time I won't delve into the key players in the creation of this world picture.

Say My Name

Just finished an installation piece, called SAY MY NAME. Really incredible in so many ways.

I guess I've found my niche in that I really really love creating installation pieces. The process is both a response to a personal environmental issue and a dialogue with a viewer during the exposure to the piece and after the fact as well with me and in the internal world of the viewer. This one resulted in an uncomfortable feeling for many as it raised issues we'd all rather not talk about any more which can lay the foundation for more of the same.

The inception of this piece began to some degree during my daughter's miscarriage experience. There we were, my daughter, son-in-law and myself, in the hospital trying to assimilate and deal with a very very trying experience and not lose it. I had to remember everything. Through the whole thing we all felt that there was a no name issue. No one would say baby, or embryo or fetus or child or her or him not even it hardly. There was this amorphous, unmouthed word almost a preconcept that could form no word or thought. Even after the baby was extracted and put in a steel dish a nurse whisked it away from me as I approached to look so it can be removed to nonexistence, a tissue, a specimen to be disposed and unheard of. It was then I knew that I would come back and address this in my art.

A few weeks later I was hosting a local cable television show called ASK YOUR DOCTOR which can be viewed at askyourdoctor.tv. After we signed off the air the doctor/friend I had interviewed asked me if I noticed anything interesting about the anatomy book he had used for demonstrative purposes during the show and I shrugged and noted that the drawings were pretty good. He nodded and told me it was a banned book and was written by a known and avowed Nazi and that it had been in circulation in the States even in the 90's. I was taken back a bit and weeks later felt a bit haunted by that book and him. Here was the son of a Methodist minister, very involved with his church and with christian matters carting this book of dissected Holocaust victims and using them to explain things to unsuspecting people.

It was here that I saw some similarities in that these victims who once had names, families, lives, favorite shoes had been reduced to an image with no name no hint of the being that once inhabited that body. The breeding ground for what is probably only the first in a series of pieces dealing with SAY MY NAME had been formed.