Hector Rene Membreno-Canales fought in the Iraq War. With his veteran’s pension, he enrolled in photography classes and composed, with the help of his comrades and classmates, a series critical of the representation of war. The methodology is simple and elegantly executed: borrowing classical painting’s rules about composition and light, he photographs soldiers and other symbols of war—weapons, flags, ammunition, uniforms—in confusingly anachronistic situations.
Intimate moments blend with wartime as the present invades the past. A strange piece of theatre plays out on a shadowy, wrinkled patch of fabric. A dull metal machine gun, wilted parsley wrapped around its barrel, sits on a table amidst a lavish spread of apples, strawberries and gourds. The grapes are presented in an oxidized Renaissance bowl, next to a wedge of what looks like industrial cheddar. Most intriguing is the presence of a soft leather motorcycle glove, symbolizing a hand reluctant to kill. The same idea is found in all of Hector Rene’s subtly ambiguous and paradoxical compositions.
Mastering the codes of classical iconography and journalism, he fuses them together into a questioning of the limits of the international strategy of the United States, almighty and fragile. Posing like Mary weeping over the body of Jesus Christ, a Navy sailor carries a lifeless, nude body on his knees, covered by the American flag. The soldier’s expression, more doubtful than torn by tragedy, speaks like a hundred voices, with the viewer free to imagine each of their faces. The title of the series,Hegemony or Survival, leaves the choice to us.
Photoville
Hegemony of Survival, de Hector Rene Membreno-Canales
Until September 28 2014
Pier 5 – Brooklyn Bridge Park
New York, USA
