Terry Rosenberg: Colors of War

Terry Rosenberg: Colors of War, a two-part exhibition of digital prints and digital slideshow, features 18 prints and an 11 min. slideshow from a larger series completed by the artist between 2008 and 2009. Charged buzzwords, such as “democracy” and “terrorism,” “indigenous” and “multicultural” are graphically manipulated and then contrasted visually within fields of bold colors. “Each painting is formally worked to find a structural origin and poetic links between opposing forces,” says the New York-based painter. Rosenberg’s designs conjure the kind of binary thinking credited with begetting conflicts, wars, and violent domination. Rosenberg uses the typological language of advertising and invokes a propagandistic tone in his representation of words as opposing concepts. His ingenious and varied pictorial treatments of these opposing terms undermines the implied flatness of the words as images on a surface, by graphically suggesting dimension and depth. “While deploying the coercive logic of binarism,” states philosopher Richard Shusterman, chair of Humanities at Florida Atlantic University, “Rosenberg’s Colors of War demystifies and undermines it in different ways.”