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Exhibition at the OSU Urban Arts Space tells stories that may be hard to hear

Posted on | September 22, 2010 | 1,348 views | Comments Off

By Julia Harris

There is nothing beautiful about war.

And yet Ash Woolson, a graduate student in the Department of Art and a veteran of the Iraq war, can’t seem to stop looking at photographs from the battlefield. It’s almost an obsession.

“Every day I go online and collect images published by the media, places like The New York Times and USA Today and even some foreign correspondents like Al-Jazeera. And I analyze them every day, looking at how the war is being narrated in the media,” he said from his cluttered studio in Haskett Hall.

“Looking at these images is painful and retraumatizing and I shouldn’t be doing it,” he added as his hands twisted together in his lap. “But I started realizing that the story the media was telling wasn’t the same story I’d lived when I was there. And I think the public has a right to understand the reality of warfare, where their money and their children are going.”

So, in addition to working on these images for his master’s thesis, Woolson teamed up with fellow veteran and art student Erica Slone to put together an exhibition called Visualizing the Experiences of War (VIEW), which runs through Oct. 23 at the OSU Urban Arts Space. The exhibit, Woolson says, is “apolitical” and features works created by local artists as well as pieces from national veterans’ projects, such as the War Experience Project — a traveling showcase of military jackets that veterans have decorated with images of war.

Using a $1,500 grant from the Idea Lab, an incubator for student ideas, Slone and Woolson put out a call for veterans and then paired them with artists who created works to represent the wartime experiences of those veterans.

More than 20 pairs of artists and veterans contributed to the exhibit, pieces that incorporated a variety of techniques and media. Slone, as both an artist and a vet, actually participated in both capacities: She told her story of war to artist George Gregory, a second-year graduate student in sculpture, who subsequently created a still-life of an army jacket, sand, glass beads and sequins. And she listened to the experiences of Special Forces veteran Dan Dixon to create her own piece, which highlights the role of camaraderie in combat units.

Of the two experiences, Slone says, the most personally challenging was the narration of her own story. “It’s somewhat uncomfortable,” she said. “I hadn’t realized what I was asking of these veterans, how difficult it could be to tell your story.”

As a staff sergeant with the Air Force, Slone served three deployments in Iraq, the last one as a police officer at a detention facility in the southern part of the country. “I saw a holding cell full of Iraqi prisoners get hit by a rocket,” she said. “When I came back I had a lot of guilt over what I had done and how I had treated people.”

Curating and participating in the VIEW exhibition has been therapeutic to her, Slone says, and she believes the exhibit can be healing to other veterans as well, particularly because of how she and Woolson have partnered with national veterans organizations like the Warrior Writers Project and the Combat Paper Project.

In the first, held in late August, 10 veterans met at OSU Urban Arts Space and did writing exercises — in journals they made and bound themselves — about their war experiences, which they then discussed amongst themselves. “When you’re in combat, you don’t see the whole picture. You see these little tiny pictures, up close, really personal, really clear,” Woolson said. “Veterans hold on to these pictures and I think many of them want to share them. This project provides a way to talk about them and share them in a healthy, safe way for everyone.”

Similarly, the Combat Paper Project, held Sept. 3 and 4, is a way for veterans to confront some of their war experiences through the very transformative act of turning their combat uniforms into homemade paper. Workshop participants brought in their military uniforms, cut them into pieces, put them in a pulper and then created sheets of thick, fiber-rich paper that they then used for art projects or as filler for their writer’s journals.

“All of these experiences are intended to show the experiences of war in a very truthful and honest way,” said Woolson, who spent a year in Iraq as a member of the Army National Guard. Some of the scenes he lived through — such as encountering a car full of wounded civilians and being ordered to keep on driving instead of stopping to help — continue to haunt him.

“I think the most important thing to take away from this project is that war is not really what they show to us on television,” he said quietly. “We have to turn a critical eye to what war really is and then determine what we’re going to do with it from there.”

If you go…

Visualizing the Experiences of War runs through Oct. 23 at the OSU Urban Arts Space, 50 W. Town St. Visit uas.osu.edu for details.

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