Iwo Jima I

by Mary Reid Kelley -

•

Of particular interest to me is the way people (myself included) remember and romanticize episodes of estrangement and violence, particularly war. The well-known image of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, captured in photography and memorialized in bronze, provided a starting point for these small paper sculptures in the photographs. The process of memorialization, with its parallels to the art processes is as crucial to the construction of personal identity as is to national identity. Elaborate and ever changing systems of identification and mythology are hallmarks of both politics and art.