Big Rock Candy Mountain

Projected on the wall by the gallery exit was Big Rock Candy Mountain 2015 a fourminute 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 Mosuls central museum morphs into a crosshatched breaching mermaid another gains a polkadot 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