Our environment is saturated with imagery. Over time, the viewing public has lost the ability to connect emotionally with images, even the most horrific. By obscuring the parts of these images that define them as historically significant and re-drawing the gesture of what lays beneath, I have compromised the meaning of both the old and the new images. What is then created makes the new image visible as well as redefining what is seen in the old image, thus creating a different relationship than originally intended between the image and its viewer. In doing so, the viewer is forced to imagine and/or intuit what is erased, compelling them to examine these images in new ways that elicit emotional and thought provoking responses.

Although most of us have never experienced war, we are surrounded by its imagery. (Re): media is an exploration of the way imagery and information from movies, videogames, newspapers, and the Internet come together to form our perception of war. Having never experienced war first-hand I am forced to put my faith in mediated expressions of the thing itself. By combining the imagery I pillage from all these sources, there is a possibility that what I am creating is more real than the individual images themselves. Explosions are war’s most universal and most spectacular signifiers. We are never falling short of this imagery. I have made use of these magnetizing images to show not only how the lines between fiction and non-fiction blur, but also to show how a mediated experience can become indecipherable from a real experience.

Beginning on Memorial Day and ending on Labor Day of 2010, I tracked the homicides within the city limits of Chicago. Once the crime scenes were processed and the red tape was taken down, I visited and photographed the site of each murder. There were 172 homicides within that time period of roughly 3 months. The resulting physical piece is a 56-foot long installation of the photographs against a caution-orange background placed in a chronological graph. The form draws attention to the homicides and their frequency in a schematic way. Moving left to right in the piece, there is one column for each day the project spans. Stacked photographs in each column reflect the number of homicides that day as well as document each crime scene. From afar, the arrangement mimics a city skyline and begs the viewer to consider whether this violence is part of the fabric of the urban environment. The sheer number of images coupled with their small size (5.5” x 8.25” and 5.5” x 3.67”) forces the viewer to come in and take a closer look. What they find are quiet, peopleless images of sites that all look vaguely familiar; sidewalks in front of two-flats, garages in back alleys, gangways, playgrounds and street corners. They will also find is the occasional scraps of red or yellow tape, RIPs scrawled on walls, piles of stuffed animals, impeccably arranged empty liquor bottles and a metal cross nailed to a tree. These small clues indicate that these are not just arbitrary locations, but the settings of murders.

Killing Season Chicago is a memorial constructed of temporary materials that change with each iteration and are destroyed after each installation’s exhibition. This wall, constructed of foam and held together by wood and tape, will degrade over time, just as the memory/image of each person killed degrades the vitality of the city itself.