UW Parkside Gallery
I visited this small, one room gallery at UW Parkside when visiting the college this November. The exhibition I found there was small yet powerful. The artist, Aaron Hughes, had displayed hundreds of ceramic cups, shaped like Styrofoam ones, with simple designs carved into each one. Each cup had a name and country written on the bottom. I thought this alone seemed powerful and intriguing, so I talked with another person at the exhibition to find the meaning behind it. I found that the cups were symbols for the 779 people held at Guantanamo Bay. The artist had discovered that many of the people held there were wrongly accused or detained without cause since 2001. Of these prisoners few possessions were the Styrofoam cups given to them with water. Hughes was inspired by accounts of prisoners drawing on these cups to create this sculpture series. He created one cup for each individual held in Guantanamo Bay, and inscribed the national flower of their country of origin. This vast array of simplistic cups provided an impactful image of the sheer number of people held in this prison, but each sculpture recognized a person as an individual.
In a corner of the same gallery was a photography series, long exposure shots of lights at night. What made this work interesting however, was learning the boy who took them is blind. The photographer was a young boy living in Iraq, and lost his sight walking into a shootout on his way home. Despite being almost completely blind, he takes photos of the things he can no longer see, pointing and shooting at what little light his eyes can detect. These pictures were very powerful to me, because they were able to capture the erratic energy and tension of the environment he lives in while only containg a few recognizable forms.