New York artist Peter Sowiski reproduced the life-size silhouette of a stealth bomber, though the gigantic image had to be bent around two walls of the gallery. Hulking and mysterious, Stealth Service magnifies the spaceage technology that drives military might, producing weapons of futuristic mass destruction. Blurred by wind and heat, the silhouettes of men working on the otherworldly aircraft almost appear like supplicants to an angry robot god, though there is also some Top Gun bravado in the cinematic-scaled piece. Sowiski used a series of panels linked by a coded schematic drawing to build his dark and gritty image that scrapes off the polish of high-tech aircraft. Eric Avery, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, works with Iraq veterans suffering from PTSD. As an artist, Avery draws upon the traditions of Mexican printmaking to create politically charged yet often humorous linoleum-cut prints. For this show, Avery created a black light installation in a dark room with prints on glow-in-the dark handmade paper. The works are eerie green reminiscent of night goggle vision. Rows of soldiers wearing gas masks and marching in lock-step fill the mural-size New World Odor. Ominous bombers fly through Do Unto Others, which centers on the figure of a kneeling man in "duck and cover" mode, surrounded by a wallpaper background decorated with fairies and toadstools, symbolizing the dreamland we lived in before 9/11. In The Square Root of Trauma, Avery charts the damage done to the brain by PTSD, using a tree root to diagram a brain circuit John Risseeuw, a professor at Arizona State University, visited countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, and Mozambique to collect articles of clothing from landmine victims, which he pulped and made into paper for his "Landmine Prints." He also added shredded currency from the top mine-producing countries, including the United States, Russia, and China. The United Nations estimates that there are 100 million mines deployed in 62 nations. While the prints were illustrated with maps and some relief images, most of the emotional impact came from Risseeuw's reports and the landmine victims' chilling testaments. Veterans shredded their uniforms to use in pulp as part of the Combat Paper Project coordinated by Army veteran and anti-war activist Drew Cameron and printmaker Drew Matott, founder of the Green Door Studio in Vermont. They conducted a workshop with local veterans to create some of the works in the show. The exsoldiers/ artists used poems and sometimes horrific images to convey their sentiments about war and military service, though their works tended to reflect the honor and sacrifice involved rather than demonizing soldiers or simply raging against war. Adding bits of material with provocative historical and emotional associations to pulp is designed to produce paper with a special emotional resonance. And handmade paper is malleable enough for artists to adapt it to almost any scale, from full-size stealth bombers to intimate blocks of text telling stories of the violent reality of war. Despite handmade paper's reputation for fragility, these artists show that it is strong enough to confront the most controversial and disturbing issues of our time.
