By Jennifer Vazquez—

Reflective, somber moods exude from the works featured at the photography exhibition “A Path Home” at the Visual Arts Building Gallery. The exhibit is part of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) Mid-Atlantic Conference and is a collaboration of 18 artists, featuring some NJCU students.

The show primarily addresses the realities of soldiers and their return from Iraq, and the impact of the war in general. Rather than using the image of the male soldier to reference the war, many pieces use women as their subject.

The piece You Should Be Over It By Now by Christine Holtz reads as an allusion to the lives of army wives. A woman’s face is shown in six frames, her face differently contorted in each. She is sitting in a computer chair, as judged by the shiny leather on the left side of each frame. The quality and composition of each frame is like that of a web cam. Without any knowledge of the artist’s intent, my thought is that she is in the midst of talking to her husband overseas.

One thing the viewer can make out for sure is that this woman is continuously crying in each frame. Another thing that’s asserted is the idea that she should “be over it by now,” as told through the title. Generally, it’s about the forgotten female victims of the war.

So much time has passed since the war began that the emotional trauma experienced by these women has been downplayed and forgotten. This reality of contemporary wartime America is what the piece alludes to.

The raw emotion of those affected is thrown in the face of any onlooker, challenging preconceived notions of women and the war and the comforting, naïve hope that time has healed all wounds.

Holtz’s piece is just one of the many pieces in the show that use a female subject to allude to the Iraq war and its returning soldiers. Some pieces assert themselves as political, making them more controversial. This holds true for the piece that consists of projected images accompanied by voice recordings.

In the untitled work by Katarin Parizek, viewers can see images of women soldiers and their biographical information while listening to contrasting, and often infuriating, opinions about the place of women in the military.

Immediately after entering the gallery, a looped recording played of an ultra-conservative radio personality making the case that women are unfit soldiers for war. He was challenging what sounded like a military official who maintained his professionalism and asserted that women have been essential to the military.

If you ever needed a way to get angry about the topic of women in the military, I’m sure that this piece would do the trick. Other pieces chose to confront ideologies on the war with a more subtle approach, relying on effectively simple imagery.

The piece Displaced Object by Iwan Bagus doesn’t even use a figure to allude to soldiers and their struggles merging into society again. Elegant and simple, Bagus shows us a chandelier centered inside a dark tunnel; the light from the tunnel shows an outdoor scene and the image is black and white. Relying primarily on the irony so characteristic of contemporary art, as well as the theme of the exhibition itself, the viewer can deduce that the “displaced object” isn’t just the chandelier, but the soldier coming home.

A must see here at NJCU, “A Path Home” reminds us that the war is never really over—not within the minds of soldiers and their struggle to assimilate into the America of today. As Displaced Object reminds us, the soldiers finding their path home seem to be appropriated into a world where they no longer belong.

Curated by Cristine Posner; showing through Dec. 13, VAB Gallery; closing reception Dec. 12, 6-8pm.