Artist’s Notes - 2007
Presidential candidate John McCain recently said that the U.S. Constitution was written for a Christian country and that no Islamic person should be the President of the U.S., reminding me of a painting of that I did in 2005, Bush/Christ/Padilla. There I repositioned the image of President Bush who was actually shown - on the front page of the New York Times - in front of a sunday school portrait of Christ. Juxtaposed with a portrait of a burqa-covered woman holding Jose Padillaís portrait, my conjecture that these images would resonate well into the future was deplorably accurate.
Three newer paintings show the images of the mourners from the funeral of Iman Mohamed El-Hakim ñ who was brought out of exile by President Bush only to be assassinated during the U.S. invasion by his own Shiite Iraqis:
Marianne Moore/Mohamed El-Hakim, 2006. Moore, who included violent sport (boxing) in her poetry and advocated the study of hard-core reality as the basis of art, is paired with a mourner at the bier of the deceased Iman El-Hakim.
Mohamed Ali/Mohamed El-Hakim, 2006. Ali who embraces Islam, poetry and anti-war is juxtaposed with a mourner holding a picture of El-Hakim.
Military Coffins/Mohamed El-Hakim, 2007. A (Bush) prohibited image of U.S. Marines in coffins is juxtaposed with two mourners at El-Hakimís bier.
We know that events of the day are not always as they seem. I often entertain juxtapositions that have no relationship at all to each other in reality, intentionally finding more obtuse parallels as visual memory takes over. My ever evolving processes for reconoitering photojournalistic imagery allow for the loose connections that in time occur - as the images finally accede to each other. The image of Marianne Moore and Mohammed Ali together - found it in the New York Times book review - was surprising. Employing artistic license to separate them and to recontextualize them with the quadra-sected photo of mourners at the El-Hakim beir, the juxtapositions intimate multi-nuanced connotations of a "bushed" global culture.