War Image 

Editor: This is "War Image" by Anna Held Audette. It's a mixed media print, including ink and pencil, and it's fascinatingly geometric. The shapes feel fractured, almost violent, and I'm curious how you interpret its meaning and the artist's intentions in creating it using these materials and this method? Curator: The process itself is revealing. The mixed media print – the layering of ink and pencil – speaks to a destructive process of war itself. We are invited to ask what labor went into it? What statements can we draw by juxtaposing this supposed "high art" with methods like "pencil drawn" techniques or "shading to add clarity," techniques commonly considered accessible or utilitarian? Editor: That’s interesting. It reframes the value and elevates those everyday skills...but what about the fragmentation and geometric abstraction, why do you suppose those stand out? Curator: That fragmented form – think about it not just aesthetically, but materially. Perhaps it's a reflection of the breaking apart of society, the fracturing of the human form under the pressures of conflict and the consumption by industrial war machine. I wonder what resources were at her disposal to produce "War Image". Were they impacted by the events? Editor: So, it is perhaps more about how the piece was constructed under constraints of material and process than simply being an image about war? Curator: Exactly! And think about the implications this perspective offers us: how it broadens the ways in which art can reveal information about material, process, consumption, and our lived experience! Editor: That gives me a whole new perspective on analyzing art, understanding not just what's depicted but the means by which it was brought into being! Curator: And considering that this work comes to us in the form of a print, it becomes a form of readily-accessible reproduction -- making this work almost like a commodity of ideas that asks, "What of these themes will you purchase? What message will you circulate?".