The War Game, Szceszcin, Poland - July 5, 1994. The airplane in this picture is a model P38 bomber that I assembled from a kit at my kitchen table in upstate New York. I brought it along on a circuitous journey through East/Central Europe In quest of adventure and lost history.. On this particular day my train was crossing the Oder River from Germany into Poland, a trip I wouldn’t have thought to make a few years before. In Eastern Europe they refer to Jews as the “roots people,” because since the fall of communism so many of us have gone back to explore the lands of our ancestry and reclaim our heritage. “Memory is the source of liberation, as forgetfulness is the root of exile” said a wise old rabbi of the eighteenth century.
"Return/The Landscape of Memory" is about travel, individual and collective memory and identity; return to my roots, transience and loss, metaphor and flashbacks. It's about seeking symbolic ways to depict the bygone and the invisible; about telling open-ended stories that ask questions for which there are no easy answers.
