Reaper make a click map series#

I made a number of attempts to “treat” the images so they looked more like images set in some sort of granite-like stone.

I tried to make the images in the book somewhat universal, hoping to evoke a timeless sense of the cycle of conflict and I attempted to include the faint hope that eventually, we may achieve some sort of resolution to this destructive cycle. I would argue that religion and religious intolerance, tied in with tribal and ethnic differences, does indeed have a great deal to do with violence and conflict today, and is often tied into nationilistic impulses promoted by politicians. She contends that it is more the nature of man that causes all this conflict and violence. However, religion, and the modern conception of religion, is different in today’s society. Reading another book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, (2014) by Karen Armstrong, I found that she argues that historically it really isn’t religion specifically that should be blamed since religion in the past was completely integrated into politics, society and culture. One of the books I read doing research was called On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, by Dave Grossman. The text that I wrote attempted to make a very short poetic version of this idea that would, I hoped, seem more generalized and universal. Of course it is and was a complicated issue, and blaming these violent clashes on any one thing is simplistic. There was always one group or another that felt they had been victimized (perceived or actually) by the other group. It always seemed caused by the friction between different belief systems and usually aggravated by tribal and ethnic biases. I wanted to comment on the perpetual wasteful wars that take place around the world, followed by rebuilding, and then again more war and destruction. Soon however, with the increasing use of drones, and then the Gaza-Israeli wars, I developed during the summer of 2014 a text and concept that I thought worked well with that eccentric form. I wondered if I would ever have content that would work and make sense with that form.

Reaper make a click map series#

I made a preliminary dummy using that structure with a series of V-shaped holders for the pop-out pages in the Spring of 2009.

Those are the kind of folds found in pop-up city maps for London or Paris and other cities. I’ve long wanted to make a book that used multiple Turkish-map-fold pages. This book was part of my contribution to a show called Four Proposals For Reading at Seager-Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, CA in February 2015. The title of the book refers to both death, as in ‘the grim reaper’, and to the model name of one of the American drone or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) used for bombing in the Middle East and elsewhere. They include the Rig-Veda the oldest sacred Hindu text, the Torah (Genesis) from the Jewish faith (the Old Testament), the first lines of the Christian New Testament Bible, and finally the first ten lines from the Qur’an from Islam. The outer tabs hold the first ten rather innocuous lines of the primary texts of four specific belief systems. In this book, based on an adaptation of the old Turkish-map-fold structure, text is read on several levels. It is most commonly caused by the friction and antagonism between different religious and tribal/ethnic belief systems and often aggravated by the extreme actions of fundamentalists on both sides and their often rigidly-held and intolerant ideas. The theme was inspired by the events in Gaza during the summer of 2014.

This is often followed by yet another iteration of that rebuilding and destruction: a painful cycle that has continued in many areas around the globe throughout history. Reaper is a meditation on the destructive cycle of violence and war, followed by rebuilding and reconstruction, then war again.