Joyce Dallal

Media Storm, 2005

Dimensions:
Up to 8’ diameter at top, up to 20’ tall depending on space
Media:
Ink-jet on rice paper
Description:
With the advent of the current war in Iraq, I felt myself in a strange and uncomfortable “deja-vu” of again experiencing the war as a spectator. During the 1991 Gulf War, I produced the piece “Family Album” which chronicled the war through my Iraqi born father’s experience of the media accounts. My father did not survive to see this new war. In 2005 I updated the original installation with the addition of a “media storm,” a tornado made from newspaper clippings about the Iraq war collected from the Los Angeles Times from 2002 to 2005. The narrative is built from the bottom of the tornado with articles from 2002 that precede the American invasion, and builds upward and outward until the text is hardly readable at the top, with articles about suicide bombings. I have shown the “tornado” both individually and together with the original “Family Album” installation. The “storm” looms over the earlier piece with a silent but threatening presence.

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