“Wars Within the Scars / Who is the target”

By Enzo Lederer-Morihisa

(click to enlarge)

Medium of Artwork:

Intaglio/Etching

Dimension of Artwork:

9 x 12 inches

Artist Statement

“This piece arose from sketches I made after a dream I had about a huge scar within the earth. The Gargantuan Trench was comprised of cities stacked upon cities. The scar revealed a subterranean stretch of vertical ruins, and was a lawless underground where remnants of the last populations on earth waged paranoiac tribal trench warfare in the many tunnels and passageways of the ruined cities. Incessant bombs and missiles rained upon the populations at random from all sides … it was a collective mass slaughter for the sake of slaughter, for the fleeting idea of survival. The explosions seen from space would look like twinkling cosmos. Settlements are built, destroyed, and repaired at the unstable blink of an eye. Remnants upon remnants. Certain sectors of the scar become permanently uninhabitable due to radiation and chemical warfare. A collective Mass culture no longer exists on earth, to survive is enough in this era of impermanence and vanishing floors. The scar is a place I have visited in my dreams. In this scene, a woman lurches back to her feet after the recent impact of a nuclear bomb. Just beyond her, a starving stork makes off with her baby, wrenched from her hands by the force of the blast. I believe that generational trauma tends to inform dreams. In particular, for me, it comes from my great grandfather’s time surviving the bombing of Hiroshima, as well as the many stories from family members. He was traveling by train on a business trip from Shikoku to Hiroshima. When the train arrived, the city had already been reduced to a desolate, barren wasteland. Without stopping, the train immediately turned back. He survived for seven years after my grandfather’s birth, but, having limited access to radiation treatment and refusing what was available, he eventually passed away. Sometimes I think about the residual radiation that may course through my body. Although this piece is from [this] dreamscape of mine, I feel it very well could be a vision one would have seen on August 9th, 1945. What exact image did my great grandfather see out of the train window?”