GUANTANAMO EQUIVALENTS
Guantanamo Equivalents amplifies my strategy of presenting physical work that is essentialist with web components that are political. In this work a series of simple square images of skies will be shown as prints and duratrans in galleries. The work in the gallery is meant to read as either an essentialist indulgence in natural beauty or a slightly parasitic mining of the charges still clinging to Stieglitz’s seminal Equivalents photo series from the 1st half of the last century.
In a reversal of interpretations, visitors to the website will find the gallery images dissolve into randomly loading excerpts from the CIA’s Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual. This is a torture manual used at Guantanamo Bay and other American-run detainment centers. The website also offers personal narratives from detainees and their families.
In view of the web content the seemingly innocent squares of sky are conceptually transformed, oscillating between the bitterly ironic and a cubicle of hope beyond all too real earthly injustice.
