Still Life on War Rug

Artist's Statement

Many years ago I came across an image of an Afghan "War Rug." These are rugs made with traditional methods and materials, but instead of geometric, mythic, pastoral or clan-related symbolism they depict the machines and machinations of war. Afghanistan has been occupied and besieged for over a generation. This brutal reality has colonized the life and imagination of the Afghan people to such a degree that it subjugates ancestral artistic imagery. As Diane DiPrima says in Rant, "the only war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it" (1971).

This painting happened quickly, bridging two bodies of work. My decisions were uncalculated and intuitive, but retroactive analysis reveals the ever-present intelligence of instinct. Embedding the war rug in a bunker-like yet domestic mid-century space points to the degree to which ongoing war has been and continues to be America's praxis. As it's always happening somewhere else, to someone else we can ignore it. But what is repressed does not disappear. Perhaps that is one message of the figure's precarious and utterly unsustainable position.