Voices in the Gallery

On one of my first days here I wandered the galleries and found myself standing for quite some time in the midst of Gabriela Bulisova’s documentary photo series The Option of Last Resort: Iraqi Refugees in the United States. The poignant works speak for themselves while many of the individuals portrayed struggle to do so. But if it didn’t one can hear the voices of the refugees, young and old, men and women, trying to locate their displacement. I could talk about the beautiful technical manipulations and compositions that clearly articulate a disenfranchised, disillusioned populace but that seems to trivialize it. I stood alone in the E. Avery Draper Showcase on a mark, quite similar to a stage marking, beneath the clear plastic half-sphere that amplified the speaker at that location and muffled it to a degree once one went not too far in any direction. The voices came one after the next talking of threats, rapes, escapes. I tried to locate a beginning and an end, but that blurred it more. As I listened I turned and focused on Bulisova’s prints, unframed and pinned to the wall, each voice seemed to belong to each face or to provide a surrogate where features were blurred. The temporal nature of the hanging combined with the universal title, Iraqi Refugee, attributed to such divergent images made the moment more unsettling. If I stepped off my mark the voices became harder to hear, the accents more difficult to sort through and I started losing them before I left the room. One image in particular I returned to waiting and wanting the figure to find resolution but it refused. I read later that after helping the American effort the woman depicted relocated to Michigan where she’s employed at a grocery store hoping one day to be reunited with the man she loves and of whom her parents disapprove. Knowing this now does not make the work better. Reading synopses of personal histories, that without fault fail to tell the whole story, does not compare to Bulisova’s sensitive, unaffected rendering of her subjects and the experience of being in their midst.

Sadly these photos no longer occupy the space; the tragedy and thrill of contemporary art. To see more of The Option of Last Resort visit:

www.metrocollective.org/home


Joseph Barbaccia's Eight Currents can be seen there now through August 29. To preview his work visit:

http://www.thedcca.org/Galleries/draper.html