These paintings are small oil paintings on mylar that lay flush on the floor. They are based on satellite images whose subjects include bombing sites, trampled shrines, a prison complex, and other places that have figured large in the Western media’s news coverage of events in Iraq.

I began to paint them in 2004 as an ongoing reaction to events of the war from the perspective of an individual at a distance, dependent upon elaborate systems of communication for information. These images, with their delicately woven patterns of geography, architecture, weather and infrastructure, the background for the current media, political and military campaigns, are here seen at an abstracted and comfortable distance. They have something to do with a feeling of disconnection, both with daily events on the ground and the political and communication systems under whose auspices these events have unfolded.