the world is no more cruel or unusual today than yesterday, we just have faster access to images and information now. images divorced from experience create perception divorced from reality. we see yet we do not understand. how can we? unless we had been there and been those people, how can we really know.

technology allows us to interact with millions of people yet know no one. people use technology because they do NOT want to be intimate, but they do not want to be alone. art imitates reality and your art succeeds in making this fact a visual reality.

can you represent a tragedy of the magnitude of 9/11 on 32 pages totaling 96 square inches?

can you understand the holocaust by seeing the id number tattooed on an elderly arm? can you visualize the loss of innosense from a single photo of a naked girl running from the bombs falling on her village? can you account for the impact of a war by the list of names on a wall? maybe you can.

the value of a memorial is not based in the cost to create it or the space it occupies. the value of a thing is related to the way it unites us into community. did the attack of 9/11 draw us together? did it make us stronger? no, it did not.

our response to the attack changed us. how we perceive tragedy is what creates reality. art is a way to manage that perception and to process collectively what happens to us individually. therefore, art allows reality to be perceived.

Thomas Hill