Speaking Freely

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The term “what goes around comes around” couldn’t be visualized more clearly than in artist Diane Bush’s “WARHEADS” photographs.

Originally shot off TV screens in 1991 during the first war in Iraq, Bush’s images of the nation’s talking heads — TV journalists and politicians — are just as current as today’s war in Iraq.

Her photographs are part of the exhibit “Permission to Speak Freely,” now on view at the Contemporary Arts Collective inside the Arts Factory. The show runs through the end of the month.

Bush took the photos up close to the TV screen using a macro lens and odd angles. After prints were made, she tossed bleach onto them, exposing the prints’ layers of emulsion, rephotographed the images and made the prints seen in the show. The results are images that look as if they’ve been in the war itself.

“I had the prints and I wanted to express the violence and distress the prints,” Bush says. “I used razor blades and then began tearing at the surface, and then I thought of bleach. And that was the magic bullet.”

The process started at her kitchen sink and ended up in her yard where she could hose the prints down before the bleach ate through them.

Bush’s “WARHEADS” is presented with her husband and artist Steven Baskin’s photo series “Talking Pictures,” which features photos of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice accompanied by audio sound bites from each one, such as “I can’t imagine someone like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah,” spoken by George Bush.

The politically charged work by Baskin also includes a shot of George Bush flipping the bird accompanied by a photo of the caskets of dead soldiers from Iraq. The piece is called “Mission Accomplished.”

In her introduction to a collection of “WARHEADS” images, Diane Bush compares the two Iraq wars. “The media’s response to the Iraq war was similar, only we now had ’embedded’ journalists. Despite that improvement, war reporting wasn’t Vietnam quality. Censorship was/is still extremely tight, and the war shown to us is still bloodless and tidy. My artistic protest against media censorship needed to convey the increase in violence to separate this from the Gulf War conflict,” she writes.

A self-described “old peacenik from the ’60s,” Diane Bush left the United States to live in Great Britain, where she was a documentary photographer for six years in London and four in the Manchester-Yorkshire area.

She returned in 1978 to take care of her sick parents. In 1981 she earned a master’s degree at the University at Buffalo. Since then, Bush has kept busy teaching photography and creating art.

This is the first exhibit at the CAC since it moved back to the Arts Factory from the Holsum Lofts.

The show was “a fluke,” says Bush, who works at Clark County Parks and Recreation. Needing a show in a hurry to reopen the gallery, Bush and Baskin volunteered to put “Permission to Speak Freely” together in record time. Most of the images were readily available from Bush’s traveling “WARHEADS” show.

Baskin’s part of the show was done in four days. He used his pocket computer to gather the images and the sound bites.

A part-timer with the Las Vegas-Clark County Library, Baskin is a conceptual artist and sculptor whose work has been shown widely in Buffalo.