Gaza Zoo is politically relevant
and scholastically informed. Gaza Zoo
is an exhibition of 150 digital prints running
in linear sequence. It is an adaptation
of a recently completed book of the same
title. As a gallery exhibition, Gaza
Zoo becomes a rapidly moving analogue
system which challenges viewers as passive
recipients of sensate image and cognitive
readers of text.
Gaza Zoo is an original work
of art and scholarship that draws from major
thinkers of our time in the fields of linguistics,
communication theory and political scholarship.
Among the most prominent of these influences
are Marshall McLuhan, Noam Chomsky, and
Edward Said.
“Gaza Zoo, among other
things, is a multilayered process based
on the politics of domination inherent in
a phonetic alphabet, and by extension, other
forms of Western communication and acculturation."
– Laray Polk
About the artist...
Laray Polk is trained as a visual artist,
i.e., drawing, painting, printmaking, etc.
She is also a student of music. Laray is
a scholar of linguistic systems, communication
theories, and anthropology. She ,too, is
a continuing and dedicated peace activist.
Yet these are but scant and inadequate descriptions
that belie all that she does with these
each and all.
The Magic Carpet Ride
Laray Polk has travelled to (either actually
or spiritually) the Maya lands of present
day Mexico, Cambodia (circa. the Khmer Rouge
and after), New Mexico (the land of the
Navajo and their surviving Code Talkers),
New Mexico (Los Alamos National Laboratories),
Tibet, Nepal (the buddhist sacred), Northern
India (the sacred music). Now, Laray is
in the zoo. She has been in preparation
for the zoo (Gaza Zoo) before 9/11, before
Fahrenheit 9/11, post 1984, post
Fahrenheit 451 decoding and unscrambling
the socio/politico/capitalistic mumbo-jumbo,
the cleaver and deceptive messages, the
bunkum, the hocus-pocus that not only cages
us in our own mind, but allows real cages,
real walls to be built elsewhere. FOR PEOPLE!
And what is Laray really doing? With subtlety
and grace she has created a book like Daedalus
giving Theseus the rope to lay behind him,
that he, Theseus, find the Minotaur, accomplish
his ends, and thus, escape the maze. Laray,
like Daedalus, is the maker of the maze,
and she, too, throws out the rope, the lifeline.
The legerdemain Laray uses in this search
and rescue comes in myriad forms, colors,
and “Ear-speak”, “Talk-see”,
layering implicated meanings over obvious
mystery. There is the obvious obscured,
distorted, rearranged and made obvious again.
But not quite. There is the quiet made loud
and the loud muted. IT IS A MAZE! It is
amaze. There is a rabbit hole and you will
fall into it. You will see the zoo. And
if you
look/see/hear you will find your trail back
to the entrance. And hopefully, you will
really see the hood, the zoo.
Grownup ALICE (Jack Mims)
" A casino, an asylum, a zoo; but
also, in a corner, a library
and someone thinking. Someone largely at
the mercy of the
croupiers, at the mercy of the idiots and
the animals; but
still irrepressible and indefatigable."–
Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza |
