Visions of Conflict is an exhibition that shows no mercy toward George W. Bush's administration or the war on terrorism. Nearly all the work asserts its anti-war rhetoric almost immediately, but not always in a good way. While there are some painfully obvious examples of preaching to the choir, fortunately there are subtler didactic works that get the same point across in a way that isn't so assaulting. The show features a breadth of artistic practices including sculpture, painting, drawing, collage, and installation by artists Lillian Bayley, Michael Sandstorm, Scrapworm, Leslie Smith III, and Deirtra Thompson, and curator Geoff Delanoy does a good job of getting all the work to fit comfortably into a small space.
In many ways, the works by Sandstorm and Bayley steal the show. Sandstorm's monolithic sculpture "Sludge" is made up of a nearly eight-foot-tall glossy black Plexiglass pedestal with a mound of melted plastic toy soldiers and die-cast military vehicles all covered in black paint. In such a close-quartered space, Sandstorm's monolith has a monumentlike presence whose physicality suggests power and permanence similar to the 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith. On the other hand, it simultaneously illustrates the growing problem of a foreign war, wasted human sacrifice, and the disconnect between the architects of war and those enlisted to fight it.
Building upon the idea of warmongering, Bayley's two digital prints "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (after Goya)" and "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (after Dürer)" appropriate art history with our current political climate, while her sculpture "Democracy Dominoes," a closely stacked circle of handcrafted dominoes with illustrations of Middle Eastern countries, could all collapse with the fall of just one.
Surely a challenging show to organize, a good deal of the work in Rendering Dissent unfortunately oversimplifies the problems we face today and does little to motivate the public into taking action. However, the strength of this exhibition is its investigation of how war is proliferated, the national and historical symbolism we identify with, and the strategies employed in the games we play, no matter how grave or minor.
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