WNC show hopes to remember U.S. war dead

Western Nevada College is preparing to host a multimedia exhibit featuring photos and essays on the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars, "Always Lost: A Meditation on War." It opens Thursday with a public reception and runs through Aug. 14.

The project couples pictures of more than 4,100 servicemembers killed in the current conflicts with creative writing pieces composed by Professor Marilee Swirczek's students and members of the Lone Mountain Writers and WNC Creative Writers.

It came about in the fall of 2008 when Western Nevada College sociology Professor Don Carlson saw The New York Times' Rosters of the Dead.

"Four thousand faces of American servicemen who had perished in the Iraq War stared at me," he said in a news release, "and I realized that this war has been perhaps one of the most impersonal wars ever fought."

He approached Swirczek with an idea of a collaboration between his sociology class, which would research and quantify the demographics of the Iraq War, and her creative writing class, which would personalize the war through poems and prose.

"The show started with simply an awareness of the thousands of war dead, while we are living a relatively safe life here at home," Swirczek said.

Though local servicemembers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are not profiled, Swirczek said the message is that these men and women all are part of our community.

"We started seeing that all of them, in a sense, were local. What started out as a theoretical study got very, very personal for my students; we realized all of those military dead were ours. They all became our sons and daughters."

Swirczek said the art show is not a political statement but simply the truth, as honest as the collaboration could make it.

In addition to those lost at war, three college students who served also are profiled with pictures, poetry and articles where they talk about their experiences in war zones.

And a Michigan mother, who somehow caught word of the project, provided poetry her son Army Spc. Noah Pierce wrote. Pierce served two tours in Iraq and suffered from post-traumatic stress when he committed suicide in 2007.

The public is invited to attend the show scheduled from Thursday through Aug. 14 in the Main Gallery and Atrium at Western Nevada College.

The focus of the show will be a "Wall of the Dead" " an installation of individual photographs of the now over 4,000 U.S. military war-dead, the literary work they inspired, charts detailing the quantifiable aspects of the Iraq War, combat photos, and interviews of WNC student-veterans who served in Iraq.

According to Swirczek, the gallery will be a "sacred space" in which visitors can contemplate the impersonal demographics and personal costs of the Iraq War, while participating in a powerful communal experience about this war and wars in general.