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August 5, 2004
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August 5, 2004 |
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New exhibit gives intimate picture of war’s devastation
In the 1970s a Hiroshima television station asked atomic bomb blast survivors to draw images from Aug. 6, 1945, that, even after three decades, still burned in their minds. More than 2,000 drawings poured in. Twenty-four of those drawings can be seen this month at the new Shirley/Jones Gallery. The exhibit, “The Unforgettable Fire: Drawings by Survivors of Hiroshima,” runs from Aug. 6 through Aug. 28. An opening reception will be held Friday, Aug. 6, from 6 to 8 p.m. Rendered by nonartists, the drawings in the show are simple. Some childlike, some dreamlike, all are riveting. “They pulled me up short,” Karen Shirley, who runs the gallery with her partner, Michael Jones, said of the drawings. “They make me gasp.” Jones described the drawings as “exquisitely defined and hugely painful.” Simple text, written by the artists, accompanies the images. One man wrote of his wife’s burned and disfigured face and body, covered with blisters. Another described seeing a woman’s decapitated head, still holding a “look of innocent beauty.” A third image shows a woman walking, carrying in her backpack her dead child. A fourth image renders a young woman, her body covered with burns, who cried for three days for water, then died. The artist wrote, “Now, 30 years later, I regret I did not give her a glass of water.” This is the second exhibit featured by the Shirley/Jones Gallery, which opened in June. Shirley and Jones plan to highlight artwork related to peace every August. An exhibit like “The Unforgettable Fire” brings home to viewers the reality that war means horrific suffering for individuals a lot like you and me, Jones and Shirley said. “When leaders try to rally people going to war they have to get the populace to forget that the other side are individuals also, people who also feel pleasure and pain,” said Jones, who curated the show at the University of Akron several years ago. “These drawings show what we forget when we talk in abstract terms about war. They’re very localized, very intimate.” The exhibit is especially relevant since the U.S. currently is engaged in war in Iraq, Jones said, and because in November voters will participate in the presidential election. “It happened a long time ago,” Shirley said of the exhibit’s images of war’s destruction. “But we’re not done with it yet.” “The Unforgettable Fire” was curated by the artist and peace activist Mark Rogovin, who traveled to Japan in the 1970s to view the 2,000 drawings. Rogovin chose 80 drawings to show at the Peace Museum in Chicago, with which he was associated. The current exhibit features 24 high-quality reproductions of those original drawings. According to a press release on the show from the Shirley/Jones Gallery, Rogovin hoped to raise viewers’ awareness of personal stories of war’s devastation. “Most importantly, that the viewer should not let this happen again, ” he wrote of his purpose in organizing the exhibit. The Shirley/Jones Gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from 2 to 7 p.m. and by appointment. For more information, call 767-1711. |
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