review
"the war room"
"the peace piece"
the war room project at
chashama gallery
part of the imagine fest
new york city
20 september 04
reviewed by
eileen connolly

An art event worth attending is the joint exhibit The War Room, a stark four-wall installation by William T. Ayton, and The Peace Piece, a multi-component art project conceived by Adele Lutz with an accompanying sound and video installation by Courtney Harmel and Sara Driver, which will run through September 30.

These exhibits are made all the more potent by their location on the non-glamorous 37th Street within the garment and fashion district of Manhattan (208 W. 37th Street). I found myself wandering down this street full of glitzy, gaudy ball gowns and trendy fashion distributors (with names like "Lycra House") looking for the gallery's address, all the while thinking I must surely be mistaken, when suddenly I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a store front window full of female mannequins wearing burkas painted with UN statistics such as "90% of War Casualties Are Civilians."

The image was staggering in and if itself but the bustling midtown traffic reflected off the glass window and perfectly highlighted by the backdrop of the black-clad mannequins added another meaningful layer to the experience. Inside the gallery, three televisions played videos of performers who wore the burkas in the spring of 2003 while slowly and dramatically marching through various locations in New York City

As I sat quietly absorbing this shockingly gentle display with such an enormous emotional impact, I was again amazed by another arresting artistic image, that of the backs of these robed mannequins as they quietly gaze out onto a world that seems so removed from their experience and yet one that has become all too sadly connected in recent times. This reflective installation seems to scream out to passing pedestrians. Its voice is honest and powerful, and its message is clear and unavoidable.

The gallery's other installation is The War Room, an aggressive grouping of images in black, white and gray, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts. Each canvas fills an entire wall: The Warriors, The Victims, The Witnesses; with the last split canvas, The Aftermath, serving as a portal through which you must pass to enter and exit. The works are large, violent, raw, primitive and ritualistic. In combination with The Peace Piece installation, it achieves its mission of being an artistic statement from which you cannot look away. It is not that the viewer is trapped by any of these images in a hostile way, but rather that the viewer is awakened from a state of ignorance or denial perhaps, and made to see reality in some of its blunt harshness.

William T. Ayton's paintings jump off the canvas with vivid images, folk archetypes, and bold brush strokes that give it a sense of speed and action. His paintings were conceived as a response to the covering up of Picasso's Guernica at the U.N. for a speech by Colin Powell leading up to the war in Iraq. For, or course, the Republicans certainly could not have Picasso's violent war work as a backdrop for a speech on a war that was being sold to the American public as a glorious patriotic duty, rather than the brutal carnage that it would be, full of nothing but wrongs and injustices being visited upon the peoples of Iraq.

Eileen Connolly currently teaches Voice and Shakespeare at The School for Film and Television and The New Actors Workshop. She is the founding Artistic Director of Wallis Knot Inc., an arts and academic collective. As a painter, she has had exhibits in New York City and Philadelphia. She was delighted to paint a cow for New York Cow Parade 2000.

"The War Room Project" continues at Chashama thru Sept. 30.
For more information, visit The War Room Project on the web.

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