home/land

Abstract

In this series, entitled home/land, documentary photographs by Christopher Cowperthwaite provide the foundation for works that are meditations on the disruptions – cultural, political, and ecological – that result from conflict and crisis. The paintings present fragmentary images of the construction of the Israel-Palestine separation wall (and its concomitant fragmentation of the land), which are fused with collaged images from other conflicts and other times, asking the viewer to consider how an ever-deepening palimpsest of conflicts has become etched in our collective memory and on the surface of the earth since the World Wars. I created this series as an attempt engage my artistic practice with the complex history and contemporary reality of globalized conflict, which, via globalized media, has become imbricated with the flow of our daily lives and thoughts. As a Canadian artist and educator, I have no direct contact with the daily crises occurring in conflict zones, yet I am impelled to respond creatively, to translate my affective response to these global catastrophes into a visual elegy and a plea for awareness of the human and ecological impacts of warfare.