Ash Kyrie
Artist Statement
Returning from the war in Iraq I became interested in how the printed media was portraying the West’s military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially the inconsistency of what I remembered and what was being depicted in the printed media. These works are exploring how the civilian population will remember these military actions without any first hand knowledge of what war looks like. The original images are taken from major media sources such as the New York Times, LA Times, USA Today, etc…After collecting these images for over a year, it occurred to me that there were only three archetypical images being presented in the media: The Benign Intervention, The Abstracted Explosion, and The Sacrifice.
Right now is the first time in American history that the civilian population has almost no sacrifice or connection to the war that it waged. For example, during WWII Americans made patriot gardens to ease the precious food supplies for the war effort. In WWI the Shetland pony almost goes extinct because of food shortages, people ate superfluous animals. Currently, only one percent of our population serves in the military. Are the red strings that connect us to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq so veiled that we ourselves do not know they exist? I believe that we understand our relationship to the war, but we consciously chose to not recognize it.
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