Jean Marie Casbarian
::
::
 
 

   

Chasing Napalm
2008

(work-in-progress)
Video / Photography / Performance

 


Fourth Chemical Unit
Officer Refresher Course
Inkjet Prints

In Arlington
2-channel video projections

Night Fires
Burning the test animals...
Slide projections

Under the Japanese Magnolia
Burning the test animals...
Slide projections

No. 0238
Burning the test animals...
Single channel video projection

Chemical Dusting,
Aberdeen Proving Ground
Full wall projections
35mm transparency slide / Video projection

Imagined Sky / He Said : She Said
Slide projection / Video projection

 

 

 

 

< .... installation home .... >

   

Chasing Napalm sets out to reconstruct my father's memory as a military officer who transported napalm and mustard gas via the Liberty Ships and convoys of World War II. As I stitch together his images with mine, a chronicle begins to unfold -- Notions of migration and transmigration, romanticized ideas of being the nomad; war, hatred, displacement, and confusion remain seductively melancholic and nostalgic. My fictions twist and distort his truths until I find an opening to construct a visual history, albeit a fabricated memory, of the past. Through a combination of photographs, slide and video projections, and private performances, I am mapping this journey that will culminate in the seafaring voyage similar to the one he had taken from Nova Scotia to England with the US convoys of 1943.