Nothing Left Here But The Hurt
In Israel, where the reality of war is daily and close at hand, public monuments are usually abstract. I am intrigued that American monuments tend to be figurative while the idea of war is, for many people, abstract. Here we are surrounded by monuments in public spaces, built to remind us of the drama of our existence and the human price of conflict, yet they are largely ignored by passers-by.
Nothing Left Here But The Hurt deals with mortality, the representation of power and memory. The series focuses on monuments of war and trauma, both at a distance and in close-ups: marble fingers, a bronze foot in a stirrup, the open mouth of a shouting soldier. The photographs in Nothing Left Here But The Hurt locate the pain, desire, loss, and sensuality in the monuments while rendering them unfamiliar. In a gridded installation, these images become an abstract reenactment of a battlefield across many conflicts at different times. Monuments of stone or bronze seem to stop time, but these images bring movement into memory as a living thing.
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The title of the series is taken from a poem by Brian Turner in his book, Here, Bullet.