words of fire

"Artificial light, man made light must reflect nature"

WORDS ON FIRE

Words on Fire is part a international project to illustrate how words become more than metaphor--they become emblematic and symbolic aspects of the structure of disenfranchisement. The recent condemnation and arrest of the operators of the radio stations in Rwanda and their apparent orchestration of the inferno of ethnic cleaning that engulfed the country merely a recent example of language and word to distance ethnic groups one from the other.

In the gallery, the installation was in two parts. A medallion on the floor at the center of the gallery has words sand blasted on glass discs, this is illuminated by two spot lights mounted on the ceiling. The walls of the gallery hold light boxes that back light words sandblasted through the reflective backing of long narrow mirrors--the words of the poem seem to float above the specular surface of the glass. The poem is the oral memory of an Anatolian refugee, exhausted from carrying bundles she can never put down as she crosses into Syria from Turkey in the early twentieth century--the artists great grandmother.