Homeland Security
Following 9/11 in 2001 I started gathering confiscated items from security checkpoints at San Francisco International Airport, in order to express visually how many of our everyday routines have been disrupted since 9/11.
The objects lend themselves to interpretations that resonate with the viewer's own personal experience. In part, I choose to see those objects as representing an arbitrary intrusion of disorder and all that is now lost and unrecoverable.
Moreover, the diverse array of assembled "dangerous" items may be regarded as the cultural residue of a particular moment in history. The fine text on the matchboxes, corkscrews, and other items is suggestive of the complex geography of that moment, of people and commodities coming into conjuncture with one another.
Seeing these ordinary objects, most of them so seemingly harmless, as imbued with the potential for danger may make us laugh, as well as make us angry. The complexity of our response echoes the objects themselves: each small tool, like each of us, bears some of the weight of a changed world.