The war in Iraq, officially named “Operation Iraqi Freedom” by the United States armed forces, is winding down. The exhibition War Work is an invitation to reflect on this war, and on the lingering impacts of this and other armed conflicts around the world. Six artists—Sandow Birk, the Combat Paper Project, Daniel Heyman, John Risseeuw, Ehren Tool, Megan Vossler—address war and its effects through drawing, printmaking and papermaking, book arts, and ceramics. Working across the United States, these artists are observers, critics and commentators, advocates and therapeutic healers. They join a distinguished historical pantheon of artists who, through provocative and beautiful work, force audiences to confront the realities of war, reflect on man’s inhumanity to man, and help to heal the wounds of war.

Artists bridge the distance between our comfortable lives and a faraway war. Because of vast distances, media restrictions, and class differences between soldiers and art audiences, war remains an abstraction to most Americans. We have little or no access to the brutality, danger, tedium, and extremes of heat and cold that define life in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Art can counteract the complacency caused by such distance. Lively brush and ink portraits of former Abu Ghraib prisoners, or handmade clay cups that stand in for soldiers, can arouse deep feelings. Huge woodcut prints and elegant graphite drawings invoking past masters stimulate reflections on war through the ages. Cast paper pieces, transforming soldiers’ uniforms and landmine victims’ clothing into art, aim to stimulate healing actions.  

Megan Vossler, who has never witnessed combat firsthand, harvests images of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan from the U.S. Army Web site. She transforms banal photographs of soldiers on maneuvers or refugees on the move into elegant drawings inviting reflection on “the system of thought that pits ‘us’ against ‘them.’ ” Isolating finely drawn figures in expansive fields of white, she encourages the viewer to seek broad meanings beyond the specific circumstances of this conflict. “When I was making these drawings I was thinking of the intersections of different people all affected by the war and all in relation to some sort of contested territory: soldiers patrolling, refugees relocating, prisoners being moved, et cetera,” Vossler says. A set of small drawings based on Francisco de Goya shows Vossler channeling the Disasters of War (1810–1820), among the most powerful visual anti-war essays ever written.

Sandow Birk also looks to art history to structure his Depravities of War, a powerful print series. Using graphic art’s capacity for forceful communication, Birk invokes Goya, and more directly, Jacques Callot, who produced the Miseries of War, a series of 18 etchings, in 1633. Callot’s diminutive compositions are blown up to huge scale in Birk’s 15 woodcuts chronicling the United States’ military involvement in Iraq since 2003. Working with Paul Mullowney at Hui Press in Hawaii, Birk composed a visual progression from recruitment to combat, synthesizing images from print media, cable TV, and the Internet. An anti-war polemic, the series includes specific images and events emblematic of what Birk calls this “lamentable and horrendous” war. In Humiliation, the now famous hooded-man-standing-on-a-box photograph of an Abu Ghraib detainee appears in a crowded prison scene. “I wanted to comment on the Iraq war in an intelligent, thought-provoking way, but also in a way that was enduring and timeless that would live on beyond the war itself,” Birk says.

Daniel Heyman creates sympathetic portraits of Iraqis who suffered in their own country at the hands of United States’ defense contractors and military troops. Accompanying a human rights lawyer taking testimony from former Abu Ghraib detainees in Turkey and Jordan, Heyman used the burin and the brush to capture Iraqi citizens who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lively lines and luscious brushwork embody Heyman’s visceral response to his subjects, whose testimony creates dancing text patterns in the white spaces surrounding each figure. Heyman presents his subjects—plaintiffs in court cases brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights—in a series of drypoints, in gouache drawings, and in a couple of accordian books.

Ehren Tool is a former Marine and artist. Tool was deployed to Kuwait during the Gulf War, aka Operation Desert Storm of winter 1991. Now faded in collective memory, the Iraq-Kuwait conflict still provides raw material to this Berkeley-based ceramist. He calls his ceramic installations and other works “war awareness art.” Literalizing the common metaphor of clay as human flesh, Tool makes cups—each slightly irregular in form and emblazoned with stenciled imagery—that stand in for soldiers. Tool groups the cups in numbers matching military units: 4 cups are a fire team, 13 are a squad, 55 are a platoon, and so on. Individual cups, if not preserved through sale as art in these organizational units, eventually break, crumble, or like the soldiers they invoke, “die alone, full of booze,” Tool says. He claims not to be for or against war. Rather, he finds it “inexcusable that so many people are ignorant of what is being done in their name.”

War inflicts deep psychological wounds on the soldiers who serve. The Combat Paper Project, orchestrated by artist Drew Matott and Iraq War veteran Drew Cameron, offers an artistic process to promote healing and renewal to fellow soldiers and others. Papermaking becomes the means of literally transforming war’s cast-off materials into a substance that can support new energies and ideas. Through workshops held across the nation, Combat Paper invites veterans to clip and shred their uniforms and “churn karmic baggage into radiant paper.” The resultant blank textured sheets prompt literary expression or pulp-painted imagery. The two Drews, principals in the Project, have created four portfolios of their own pulp-painted pictures, and produced broadsides emblazoned with poetry on themes of war and peace.

John Risseeuw, a long-time artist-activist, also foregrounds paper-from-scratch in a humanitarian project aimed at ameliorating the horrors of war. Landmines, deployed in Iraq and many other territories worldwide, render home unsafe for its inhabitants long after war subsides. Risseeuw’s Landmine Project, initially catalyzed by the situation in Cambodia, raises funds for landmine victims while raising awareness of this global problem. Risseeuw makes art objects for sale, incorporating into the pulp clothing from landmine survivors, plant fibers from landmine locales, and currencies from nations responsible for producing explosive devices. Proceeds from these paper pieces support groups dedicated to rehabilitation and to eradicating this threat around the world.

The artists in War Work invite viewers to constructively engage with the Iraq War. To truly see the brutal consequences of this and other armed conflicts, to reflect, and to seek healing and peace.

— Laurel Bradley, Director of Exhibitions