Open/Closed
OPEN/CLOSED curated by Amber Zora
May 2019
Featured Artists: Cao Ba Minh, Fanny Garcia, Karin Rodney-Haapala, James Razko, Brandon Secrest, Gerald Sheffield & Yeon J. Yue
Open/Closed showcases veteran artworks that challenge the ways that first person narratives are used to express veteran identity. This exhibition was put together out of a desire to complicate and, at times, reject didactic approaches to veteran art that conflate the stories of combat and war-time deployment with the identity of the veteran upon returning to civilian life. Instead of explaining or reflecting solely on the experience of conflict, these artworks turn to the periphery of veteran life, to the ways in which veterans move through and experience spaces of the everyday, now colored by their time in the military.
For veterans, it is often hard to escape the model of the service member shown on television, in film, and in recruitment and patriotic marketing campaigns. This becomes even more complicated for veteran artists who are often chosen for art exhibitions because they are assumed to be able to speak directly to the experience of combat and veteran life. This experience, it is thought, inheres powerfully in wrenching moments and images of death, trauma, visits to the VA, medication, and wounded bodies. These images can be profane or poetic, barren or imaginative, routine or unexpected; but they all frame the veteran experience within the need to narrate, describe, and explain the horrors of combat and the traumas of post-military life to those who have not experienced it.
The artists included in this show — Fanny Garcia, Cao Ba Minh, James Razko, Karin Rodney Haapala, Brandon Secrest, Gerald Sheffield and Yeon J. Yu — seek to expand the scope of the representation of war and, especially, of the postwar experience. Like Jasper Johns, Charles White and Robert Rauschenberg, they do this by turning to the allusive and, at times, mundane fragments of life (in this case, veteran life). Images of tiles, doorways, windows, color fields, and the small tender moments of family life present a mosaic of affective moments that, rather than creating a clear story, gesture toward what remains unrepresentable and unnaratable in veteran experience. Thus, these works are not linked by a singular way of viewing and making veteran art. Instead, each suggests the complex personal ways by which veterans piece together and narrate their lives from the fragments of the everyday that greet them upon their return.
Gerald Sheffield and James Razko both look at design and physical structures from places that the U.S. has occupied. Razko, in his series The Compositions, creates paintings composed of the damaged, decaying, and cracked images of tiles he has seen during his deployment in Iraq. He employs trompe l’oeil – literally translating to “fool the eye” – to create a hyper-realistic experience of three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional frame. Razko explains that his use of trompe l’oeil serves as a loose metaphor for the ways that trauma Karin Rodney-Haapala, OCD, 2013. and post-traumatic stress disorder are experienced and then re-lived. In lieu of explicitly depicting combat, Razko shows the consequences of conflict on the environments in which it takes place. While it remains unclear if the tile patterns are real or a pastiche of Middle Eastern motifs, Razko’s works are attempts to reconstruct, from memory, a hyperrealistic image of the relationship between the lives and spaces in which modern conflict unfolds, and the destruction brought to these places by combat. This decay is not framed triumphantly – rather, we are shown a loss of cultural heritage, even if the loss is not of one’s own culture.
In Gerald Sheffield’s works featured in this exhibition, we see the repeated form of an arched doorway. The frame opens onto a darkness, an unknown “other space,” that is ominous and haunting. The inaccessibility of the space beyond the arched door becomes, in these works, a standin for the psychological blacking out and blocking off of what cannot be represented. The stark qualities of Sheffield’s images provide contrast to that of Razko’s or Yue’s works.
Yeon J. Yue’s Grey American Landscape series depicts scenes of quiet domesticity, highlighting the live of soldiers and their families. These intimate scenes recontextualize the image of the military family. As a Korean Air Force veteran, Yue served alongside American soldiers in Korea, where the military drafts its male citizens into mandatory service for over two years. There he became interested in documenting American veterans and their families. The photographs are difficult to place in time because of the outdated nature of the housing, military buildings and hotel bedspreads. In the corners of these images, viewers find duffle bags packed, clothing piled up, moving boxes, empty and full bookshelves, and undecorated walls. Among these signs of passage and deployment, there are yellow ribbons and military photos. The weight of “the temporary,” the exhaustion of movement, hangs over these spaces.
In Karin Rodney-Haapala’s OCD and Journal Entry, the viewer is presented with an image of nine seemingly identical images of an iron. The journal entry states:
I unplugged the iron. I have to check to see if it is unplugged again
and again
and again
and again
and again
and again
and again
and again
and again
Nine trips home to see if the damn iron is unplugged.
Unlike the other pieces in this show, Rodney-Haapala’s work uses narrative to speak of the veteran experience; however, her narratives circle around the effects of war and deployment without speaking directly of the war. Although the trauma of military deployment is palpable in her need to check the iron over and over again, what we experience is the transformation of the domestic under the pressure of military conflict. Through this perspective, the work is imbued with an urgency arising from the embodiment of the lingering effects of combat in the everyday practices of the body. Repetition and return becomes a ritual, a way of reestablishing the facade of order and organization that is lost upon crossing the threshold into civilian life.
While there may be comparisons drawn between many works in the Triennial, Open/Closed stresses the variety of veteran responses to the return to civilian life. Highlighting these different ways of coping with “crossing the threshold” is not meant to isolate and exclude, but rather to show the vast and complicated nature of veteran art, and the way the artists employ many different mediums and subjects. Hopefully, this show acknowledges this multiplicity of experiences and responses, in turn shifting commonly accepted narratives about who veterans are and what kinds of art they make. This exhibition seeks to reopen questions about the nature of veteran art, and the complex and fraught intersection between war and poetic or visually sensuous work. Open/Closed pushes viewers to recognizes veterans through the complexities of civilian life, rather than as hero or victim symbols.
