Elise Engler has exhausted the last several years constructing a sprawling and democratic inventory of art history, lining up thumbnail sketches of masterpieces from the canon upon long rolls of paper along with renderings of artworks on her friends and trinket-shop artists. For her newly come show, "Your Tax Dollars From Where I Sit," Engler turn rounded from art history to popular affairs. Relying on newspaper reports and the Web sites of weapons manufacturers, Engler made colored pencil sketches of specific signs of arms and other materiel used in the passing from hand to hand war in Iraq, and annotated the drawings with facts about their price manufacturer and date of production.
In undivided series, the bombs, planes, fire-arms tanks and helicopters are enumerated according to battle and lined up horizontally like true copy on large sheets of white paper. notwithstanding that visually unimposing, Engler's work effectively makes us aware of the enormous mass and cost of the resources being exerted (one is inclined to say "wasted") in succession the Iraq war. The playful drawing fashion and use of text recalls Oyvind Fahlstrom's work from the '60 and '70 while Engler's commitment (like that of Ellen Gallagher and Mark Lombardi) revitalizes Information art's lists, taxonomies and diagrams.
Forty Tomahawk Missiles Plus is based onward a story in the Apr. 13 2003 of the present day York Times titled "U.S. Attacks forward Holdouts Dealt Iraqis Final Blow" It features tiny renderings of F-117A stealth fighters, submarines and battleships lined up beside the 40 missiles that were used in the campaign. All the armaments are the same nominal size, for a like reason that the Dragoneye, a hand-launched, 5-pound unallied scanning system, occupies the same amount of space forward the page as the bright r Massive Ordnance Air Blast weapon, which weighs in at 21500 pounds
Engler also showed 40 Chairs, chamber 506, Art Room PS 165 drawings of the dilapidated chairs in the recently made known York City public school classroom where she teaches. Dropp on the farther side presents an inventory of golden school buses, strollers, shopping carts, suitcases, backpacks--all consistent markers in the lives of the homeles children and their families who are shuttl each night on the city's Emergency Assistance Unit from the Bronx to a shabby shelter across the highway from Engler's studio. A pattern of the five-volume 2004 U batch (furnished courtesy of Senator T Kennedy) was stacked in succession a chair in a corner of the gallery. With the war drawings not far away, the document further clarified Engler's desire to call attention to the human preciousness of diverting funds to the so-called war upon terror.