What Whitney says - SANDOW BIRK

Whitney Strickler is Migration’s current intern. She is a 4^th year art history student at the University of Virginia. Laura and I have asked Whitney to review some shows currently up in Charlottesville (keeps you from having to read my yammering). Many thanks to Whitney, for these thoughtful reviews.

Sandow Birk - The Depravities of War @ 2^nd Street Gallery

Sandow Birk approaches the controversy of the Iraq war with wall sized prints made from woodcuts. The scenes have a cartoon-like feeling to them making them look like editorial cartoons cut from a newspaper and blown up to fill a wall. One of the first prints I came across was a scene of army recruiters signing up new recruits at a table with posted signs reading "Free College" and "Don’t Ask Don’t Tell" as temptations to young men wandering by. A line of soldiers prepare to leave corporate America which looms behind them; and men say goodbye to their parents and girlfriends. The scene portrays young men excited to be leaving home for new opportunities and experiences. Around the corner in the gallery was another woodcut titled "Repercussion" showing a line of men out the door of a building marked with a sign "Veteran Services." The men from the first scene had come home, but were not the same. Here they were shown in wheelchairs, on crutches, and with missing limbs. The army, so quick to recruit them, has left them desolate and broken, forced to wait in long lines for care from veteran services.

Birk attempts to address the problems of war by focusing on the current events in Iraq; each print is a snapshot, the U.S. Senate, Army training, the hanging of Saddam, etc. He aims to document the tragedies of war for future generations. His artist statement says the series displays his "continual, perpetual frustration with the very fact of this war." It also describes his goals to "make smart political art, and to make a work that lives beyond this war to speak to warfare and all wars." The pieces are certainly readable and it is not difficult to understand what the artist is attempting to convey to the public through these scenes but I did not find them as effective as they could have been. I found the motivation behind the series to be more fascinating than the works themselves.