Opening Gala

Video from The Harsh Desert Exhibition

My friend Stacy Wiedmaier recorded this video of The Harsh Desert’s open­ing gala. It is quite amus­ing lis­ten­ing to their con­ver­sa­tion regard­ing which pieces are pop­u­lar with what demographic.

I missed out on all the excite­ment of my first exhi­bi­tion, because I was in the Philippines con­duct­ing train­ing with the 31^st MEU. Many thanks to the peo­ple that made my exhi­bi­tion pos­si­ble, Stacy, Michael, Juan, Ryan, and espe­cially Rick. Rick was going through inten­sive chemother­apy dur­ing the dura­tion of my exhi­bi­tion, but some­how man­aged to wake up at 5 in the morn­ing to con­duct an inter­view with KMIR 6. I am grate­ful for what he has done and for putting such a classy exhi­bi­tion in my absence.

The Harsh Desert opened with crit­i­cal and pop­u­lar acclaim in February, 2008. It has had a suc­cess­ful run and I am def­i­nitely ready for a big­ger exhi­bi­tion. I am plan­ning a much big­ger exhi­bi­tion of my work for this year’s sea­son, one that will encom­pass more of my work and not just from Iraq. Though, I will most likely still use the stronger and emo­tional pieces from the pre­vi­ous exhi­bi­tions in the new ones. The ques­tion is, of course, is find­ing an appro­pri­ate venue that can accom­mo­date the scope of the exhi­bi­tion. Choices, choices.