Life Sized Lead Soldiers

This new body of work is based on a collection of lead soldiers my father assembled over the course of his life. I was surprised when I inherited them to see how many depicted Arab and North African soldiers. There are Zouaves, Saracenes, Mamaluks and Ottoman Turks. It struck me as strange that we have been demonizing certain world cultures forever. That even in child’s play the exotic could take on a menacing and evil aspect.

My first instinct was to look closer. I take macro photographs of the figures with raking light to heighten their effect and to exaggerate the distortions in the figures. I then use the photographs as a starting point for a series of paintings that are larger than life. The scale is important to me because I want to reverse the roles of viewer and subject and have the toys loom over us. A toy Buckingham Palace guard can tower over the viewer like an equestrian sculpture. The backgrounds have varied from suggestions of landscapes to more familiar still life shelf settings. They can appear almost real and at other times more in keeping with the sculpture as still life tradition.

The most exciting aspect of the blow-ups is the ways in which the figures become distorted by scale. Hands and feet appear to have been mangled, the pockmarks of missing paint look like shrapnel wounds. Faces that seemed acceptable as miniatures become grotesques when enlarged, swords become chain saws and rifles become candy canes. What was serious appears absurd and the innocent becomes morbid. Riflemen teetering on their wobbly stands becomes a metaphor for the instability of colonialist thinking and the entire project takes on the feeling of some horrific déjà vu. It’s frightening to think that so much animosity could be embedded in a child’s toy.

6/08