Big Rock Candy Mountain

Projected on the wall by the gallery exit was Big Rock Candy Mountain, 2015, a four-minute video animation of one thousand stills taken from footage of ISIS militants toppling statues and wrecking artifacts in Syria and Iraq. The stills have been painted, drawn over, or collaged so that the felled works become reanimated: An Assyrian statue housed at Mosul’s central museum morphs into a cross-hatched breaching mermaid; another gains a polka-dot skin; yet another crashes to the ground enveloped in writhing pink roses. These whimsically patterned phoenixes, emerging from the ruins of sacred artifacts, provide a determinedly dreamy rejoinder to unimaginably destructive acts of censorship and constitute a celebration in their own right.