Air to Air, Schmidt Gallery, Principia College, Elsah IL 2021
Collaborative exhibition with Jane Barrow

“In this context Jane Barrow’s and Cheryl Wassenaar’s engaging but disquieting exhibition, Air to Air, provides several interconnected ideas and perceptions for the viewer to unpack.  Among them are the artists’ critique of military warfare; the power of contemporary image culture and its use as subject matter in the fine arts; the ubiquitous ambiguity and abstractness of language and our anxieties about it; and, perhaps most importantly, the uses and manipulations of language by power—power being the dominant, controlling sector of any community, organization, or institution.”  excerpt from catalog essay by Paul Ryan, Professor of Art, gallery director

Air-to-Air explores the language of power and conflict, inviting reflection on the relationship between destruction on the ground and a mock assumption of clarity in the air. Barrow’s paintings and large-scale fighter jet drawings have evolved over a decade as a response to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; they are based on FLIR (forward-looking infrared) and HUD (head up display) images as seen from a fighter jet or drone. Wassenaar’s imposing black text wall quotes USAF Colonel George Grill describing the “guidance system” used to gauge and correct increments of error in missile-based combat. The dense, tightly-leaded block of text strains legibility—much like the explanatory language itself. The visual scramble of letters act like pixelated data slowly fading into gray. The term “error” is reactivated through tonal shifts as the viewer scans the lines of text.

exhibition image right: This Equation is Known as “Error” vinyl wall installation, approx. 14 x 9.5’ 2021. Left: Holes series, manipulated newspaper cover, digital print on aluminum, 14 x 10.5” 2021 *Original text on GLCM Guidance System submitted by Colonel (Ret) George Grill in 1970, Air Force Missileers, by the Association of the Air Force Missileers, “Victors in the Cold War” AAFM Turner Publishing Company, Paducah, KY Copyright 1998, pg. 45 - 6.

In the center of the passage, a circle—evoking either a target or hole—references the nearby photographs of manipulated newspapers printed on metal. Using a pre-existing template that marked a target, she drilled through stacks of hard copy newspapers, rupturing hundreds of headline images from across the globe. The resulting elisions often suggest violent-looking material debris, missing information, and incongruent associative layers.