What we take and what we leave

Installation
"Close Calls", Headland Center for the Arts, Sausalito California 2005

Gel pen drawings, photographs from website now censured www.nowthatsfuckedup.com and mixed media.
Dimensions variable

Suzanne Husky explores issues of authenticity and adaptation, particularly in political social and environmental context. What we take and what we leave was initiated by researching the Middle Eastern origins of various plants commonly found in American landscapes and gardens. Simultaneously, Husky encountered a website created by American soldiers stationned in Iraq, where offhand and off-color comments were casually posted next to horific images of dead and mutilated Iraqi civilians or insurgents. This installation brings together several elements :drawings of Iraqi natives, photographs of homes landscaped with prunus laurocerassus (English Laurel, a ubiquitous garden shrub, and hybrids from Iraqi natives planted in sandbags printed with photographs taken by American GI's. As Husky notes, "more than wanting to comment on war, I want to observe variations on ways to be , in a given situation. By pairing different human attitudes towards a foreign country, the one of a botanist...and the one of a soldier, trained to a certain behavior, I'm trying to understand."Patricia Mahoney

Persian plants that are common in our landscapes

Prunus laurocerassus, English Laurel