In 2003, shortly after the onset of the Iraq War, I began working on a series of photographs entitled INTERVENTIONS focusing on the horror and human cost of wars being fought in far-off places. These photographs depict images of soldiers, car-bombings, ruins, explosions, and refugees, which are digitally embedded into the familiar streets and parks of New York City, Baltimore and the New Jersey wetlands. . INTERVENTIONS attempts to make visually evident the ongoing tragic repercussions of war in our own backyard, as well as the equally powerful manipulation of the electorate through the “politics of fear.”
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Manipulation/Dis-Integration paintings are the outcome of five years of work continuing an interest in the manipulation of information. My previous series focused on the power of film/cinema to shape the way we view reality, and now my focus is on photo-journalism. I also am interested in the form the work takes. Manipulation/Film paintings were executed in panels similar to film stills; the Manipulation/Dis-Integration² paintings are the product of digital filters photos downloaded from news sources are digitally filtered - and the resulting works are visually blown apart as metaphorically information is literally ‘filtered’.Grace Graupe-Pillard 2007.
Grace Graupe-Pillard appropriates photojournalistic imagery from the Internet or the news, and repaints the images. By heightening color to high contrast, and by creating zig-zag fields of linked abstract forms, Graupe-Pillard has dislodged elements of the photos from their context in an event or in history, and returned them to the stories of individuals. The work is clearly a response to the new world we live in characterized by tribes, raw surfaces, monumentality, meandering abstraction, escapist fantasy, borders, nomads ideas, motifs; symbols of a culture, as they build up, daily, in a milieu. And no doubt Grace Graupe-Pillard’s new work is political. She recaptures the human tragedy that is too often blunted by the mechanics of patriotic or political representation (as in Red Hand, which I do not read as an anarchist cry against a solider with blood on the hands, but a sickened wish to see all bloodshed come to an end). Like an Afghani rug-maker that keeps weaving traditionally, even when a Soviet helicopter happens to wander into the pattern, Graupe-Pillard’s touched-up reality has a sublime artfulness that predicts that long after the dust of history settles the art of humanity will lives’.
Robert Mahoney. 2003
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