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At his cluttered studio in midtown, artist Ryan Roa is at work on a sculpture.
ACT: SAW: after 2 sec. fade down
His pieces look like every day objects—a payphone, a life-size Hummer—but made entirely of wood. Roa takes a break on a sawdust-flecked couch shoved against the wall.
ACT: RYAN ROA 5 sec.
I was called up to Iraq right before my last semster.
Roa joined the army reserve to help pay for art school. In 2003, he was sent to Iraq as a civil affairs specialist—a liason between the military and civilians.
ACT: RYAN ROA 8 sec.
My life completely changed. I wasn't an artist, I wasn't making art, I wasn't thinking about it, I was just there surviving.
Roa was in the UN building in Baghdad when it was blown up by a truck bomb. He was among the first responders, digging people out of the wreckage. He and his men had been living in the compound, so they knew some of the people on the staff.
ACT: RYAN ROA: 6 sec
I remember there was this one girl, I think she was a secretary at the UN and I had talked to her the day before and you know she had been killed.
But Roa says he is NOT making art about his experiences in the war. That part of his life is over. He says he never purposefully references it in his art.
ACT: RYAN ROA: 13 sec.
I know a lot of people they have trouble forgetting it, but for me you know it's my past. And if you dwell on the past then you have a hard time existing in the present and the future. And I'm more interested in the present and the future.
But it's hard not to make a connection between the war and Roa's piece in the center of this gallery. And the show is called Testimony to War. Roa's sculpture is called Freedom Calls. It's a large platform of unfinished wood. Planks in the top evoke the stripes of the flag. You can stand on it to hear a recording of phone calls Roa made to random people all over the country. He asked them, what does freedom mean to you?
ACT: Recording of phone calls 5sec:
Freedom to me is the right to practice whatever religion I want, (fade down) and raise my children…
Cross fade to gallery sound.
In a photograph, blood pools around the head of a robed woman. In a bright water-color , American soldiers talk to a crowd of Iraqis. Themes of the war are explicit in the other works in the show. Steve Mumford says that's the way it should be.
ACT: STEVE MUMFORD 11 sec.
I think that art should be able to deal with the most serious and fraught subject matter we have to offer and I can't think of anything more fraught than a war that we're currently fighting.
Mumford is the artist behind the vibrant water-colors and drawings in the exhibit. Unlike Roa, he's a civilian. He's been to Iraq five times since 2003 to capture scenes of the war with brush and ink. That may seem an archaic way to record a war, but, he says—
ACT: STEVE MUMFORD 8 sec.
I felt like I had access to scenes where somebody who was carrying a camera would feel a lot more self conscious or obnoxious.
On his last trip, Mumford spent days on end at the Baghdad ER. He was sometimes in the room in the last moments of a person's life, recording the scene on paper.
ACT: STEVE MUMFORD 19sec.
All this sort of flurry of activity would finally die down, and it was like there would be half a dozen people who would have to accept that everything they'd been doing had come to nothing, and the chaplain would be there doing the last rites and somebody'd be preparing a body bag, and I'd look around and I'd see that all these docs and these nurses had tears in their eyes as well.
He says these quiet spaces afterwards were more difficult than witnessing the bloody work of the O. R. And, like Ryan Roa, Mumford says his work isn't a moral condemnation of the war, though some pieces may be seen that way—images of an amputation in progress, marines mourning a lost comrade.
ACT: STEVE MUMFORD 8 sec.
The project is my interest in war and my interest in describing how a war zone is different from a place that's not a war zone.
Steve Mumford plans to return to Iraq in April. The exhibit at the School of Visual Arts closes March 8th. Andrea Mustain, Columbia Radio News