from the mouth of babes....

One of the new dresses that is at the Arsenal Center for the Arts is the Dog Tag Dress. I was very glad to be able to finish this sculpture for this show because I wanted to show a piece about this on-going, ever-lasting conflict/war/sadness.

This dress is child-sized with a plaster top which is painted with an abstract version of the map of the Middle East ~ Iraq is right over the heart.

Below the map is a quagmire of wires – tangled, knotted wires. Dangling from the wires in a random manner are dog tags. On each of the dog tags I affixed a stamp sized photo of recently killed soldiers. Upon the death of the 4000th soldier killed in Iraq the New York Times published an article called Faces of the Dead ~ four pages of pictures of the last 1000 to die in Iraq. Along with the pictures, the Times also printed excerpts from some of the dead soldiers’ letters, dairies and emails. In one of the passages one of the soldier wondered if many Americans could point out where Iraq is on a map – this resonated with me and gave me idea for the piece. When two 9 year olds sat and looked at the piece I heard them asking questions like ~ why is there war??? From the mouth of babes…..