In an email exchange between cocurators of the art exhibit for Veterans Speak, Army veteran Adam Nilson explains his photography this way: “I have discovered that art is a therapeutic outlet and another way for me to communicate difficult situations and feelings that I do not care to vocalize. I have also noticed that art can be used as a tool to bridge the gap in understanding between veterans and civilians.”
During the two weeks of Veterans Speak, the galleries at the Dairy Center will be filled with relics of military service — one gallery will house artifacts from the Women Marines Association and Broomfield Veterans Memorial Museum and two adjacent will feature artwork made by veterans that directly addresses their time in the service. The show is diverse both in the media and in the wars represented, beginning with a sculpture made by World War II veteran Fredric Arnold (see story on page 23) and continuing to a collage made by a soldier who was in Desert Storm and a bridal veil of hand-knit lace made by a woman veteran who recently married a man she met in the military.
“One way an exhibition can be successful is by arresting your attention and giving you pause to want to investigate further. Why did these people take these photographs? Why did they make this painting?” says Mary Horrocks, co-curator of the exhibit and curator of visual art and education for The Dairy Center for the Arts. “The immediate effect with the life-size sculpture, the worn boots that belong to an unknown soldier, is to be struck by — I’d use the word awe of really what that commitment is when someone signs up and says they’ll fight no matter what. … I want members of the public to really stop and have an experience of awe and respect.”
Many of the pieces are photographs taken by military service members that offer a glimpse at the kind of lives they lead.
“These were the kinds of things that we never saw in magazines or television,” says Sally Elliott, the third co-curator of Contemporary Visual Expressions. “People will be able to get a better point of view of people who were there.”
Nilson, who was an Army infantryman and worked with a small team of advisors to the Afghan National Army, has a number of photographs included. His images show a machine gun from the shooter’s end, an isolated image of his boots and, in another, boots on his feet as they rest on the door of a truck with the snarl of barb wire visible just beyond the door, a boy being carried away from a fight scene in a wheelbarrow his father pushes.
A veteran might not want to say much about time in Afghanistan, or be able to find words that recreate the feeling of an experience like watching children grow up in a war-torn country, trying to find a way between American forces and Taliban influences just to get to school each day. But Nilson’s photograph of two boys in the window of their school shows that he did pause, somewhere on patrol, to think about the children growing up amid this ongoing conflict.
Likewise, a photograph taken by Vietnam veteran Ted Engelmann in 1968 shows brown strips of the Vietnamese jungle dying off where Agent Orange had been sprayed. In his statement, Engelmann clarifies, “The fleshy color in the lower right is my knuckle. We were taking ground fire, I was scared, and held my rangefinder camera in a death grip.”
Englemann has continued to take photos in conflict zones and of soldiers. His work to be exhibited includes a photograph taken at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial State Park in Angel Fire, N.M., of two World War II veterans who drove from New Orleans to New Mexico to greet Vietnam veterans. Englemann’s statement says that for years, he saw older veterans shun the younger generation because they “lost” the war in Vietnam, and this was the first time he saw older veterans welcoming younger ones.
His photos from Afghanistan and Iraq have tough subtexts. One shows a group of eight soldiers at a Thanksgiving dinner in Baghdad. Within a few weeks after the photo was taken, one would die by suicide, one would be discharged for PTSD and one would be deployed to Afghanistan where he was killed. Another shows a pair of hands passing a Zippo lighter that reads “Viet Nam 71-72 You have never lived til you’ve almost died.”
Englemann notes that the lighter belonged to a Humvee turret-gunner whose father was a Vietnam veteran. They’d never talked about the war, and so the young soldier asked Englemann what he should expect his emotional life to be like when he goes home.
“There’s a lot of contemplation with every piece,” Horrocks says.
The goal is a little bit of education. The result is a lot of empathy.
For those who feel the need to say something in response, one wall of the gallery will be dedicated to an art piece called “Reflect/Respond/Record” that gives visitors a space to write down their reflections to be hung up each day for other visitors to view.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
