Jane Irish: War is Not What You Think

The last NewsWorks project that I pitched and filmed around late March. I interviewed Jane Irish and John Baky and did most of the editing, while Adam Carson handled the cinematography. Nikki Violi and Cristyn Robinson (boom operator) were there for help and support.
Jane Irish's art exhibit, War Is Not What You Think, had taken place as a collaborative exhibition of the La Salle University Art Museum and Connelly Library. Through this exhibit, Irish wants to show visual culture on the Vietnam War, and also to show the way we interpret war. Jane Irish has about three areas in the La Salle University Art Museum showcasing many different paintings, films, poetry, and vases. A cyclorama, painted in stark blues at the top and rusty reds in one section, that took her about six months while another section took a remarkable three weeks, painted in all blues using ink on paper. The cyclorama was a piece she felt was much more distinguishable than what a viewer gains from a black-and-white documentary photograph from the same period. The paintings in another part of the Art Museum showed the paintings she had done while she had taken two consecutive trips to Vietnam, done in gouache on Tyvec. Those paintings are accompanied by poetry from real experiences during the Vietnam War, in all of its explicitness.
In the second location, which is in the Connelly Library, shows a special collection Imaginative Representations of the Vietnam War, which has twenty thousand items, some being novels, screenplays, sound recordings and much more. John Baky who is the curator and a Vietnam veteran himself stated that this exhibit is not about the war, but more about the setting for that specific war. Jane Irish's agenda in War Is Not What You Think was to paint intensely and speak freely, stating that these Vietnam War writers "give us the gruesome matter of fact elocution of telling the truth, in hope that wars like the Vietnam War will be ceased by an act of will and imagination. I intend that my work makes beautiful alternative heroisms of the antiwar veteran in the Vietnam period."