Art Institute of Boston Gallery at University Hall
1815 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts
November 5 through December 5
USING THEIR CAMERAS, TWO ARTISTS SET OUT ON PERSONAL JOURNEYS TO RETRACE STEPS AND TO VISIT PLACES WHERE A FATHER AND A GRANDFATHER'S PASTS BECAME BRIDGES OF COMMONALITY BETWEEN TWO DIFFERENT WORLD WARS.
Separately, each artist came upon
an incongruous serenity where
the passage of time had become
complicit in silencing the horrors
of war. The dissimulation of killing
fields and prison camp locations —
the creation of seemingly peaceful
landscapes — makes for a thoughtprovoking
exhibition of two dozen
photographs titled: “No Man’s Land.”
Bonnell Robinson’s images come from the Western Front (France, Belgium)
and the Italian Fronts (Austria, Slovenia) of the Great War, which
raged from July 1914 to November 1918, and had a final tally of
9,991,000 soldiers dead from combat, and approximately another 27 million
wounded or missing in action.
Robinson said her grandfather
survived WWI, but could not speak of it to his family for the rest of his
life. It was reading his detailed diary
that compelled her to examine those
places, inducing sustained reflections
within her on all wars since that war.
Robinson said she’s nearing 60 years
of age; her work is to be viewed as
a connection to the past, a focus on
certain visual evidence of war memories
as retrospective documentation.
It’s clear that Robinson has an
entrenched personal view that wars
are utterly futile and end as tragedy:
death’s feast.
Dana Mueller’s images are of locations
that once were WWII prisoner-of-war
campsites, constructed between 1943
and 1945 throughout the United
States. They held 500,000 German
soldiers captured in battlefields,
many of them from North Africa and Normandy, and marching under
General Erwin Rommel’s command.
Mueller immigrated to America from Ernstthal, East Germany where
three generations of her family survived hardship from the ravages
of war and its fallout; this has made her keen on using her art to
illustrate the complexity of human experience not adequately captured
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