This particular journey began in the desert outside Tucson where I was photographing stored and salvaged aircraft. The fact that these were mostly military aircraft became important to me as I was printing the pictures back in New York. About that same time I saw an article about the restoration of the Enola Gay at one of Smithsonian’s facilities. Soon thereafter I went down and took pictures of the various pieces, as the plane was taken apart. As I got caught up in the history of the bombing of Hiroshima, I came across two images of clock faces that were frozen by the atomic blast on August 6, 1945. Over the years these images have been widely disseminated through newspapers, history books, magazines, and the like. I incorporated them into many of the subsequent works.

All these works are meant to function as icons. While the suite of silkscreens owe much to the Stations of the Cross, their number (8 prints on various building materials and 2 paintings on slate) are relative to the Enola Gay (#82).

Combined with some of the other related paintings, these were all originally conceived as one installation.

The past four and a half years of work has revolved around images of debris from the World Trade Center. These images are based on my own photographs of the scrap, as bearing witness has always been central to my process. After 6 months of letter writing and interviews at Police Headquarters I ended up shooting pictures at the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island. I also learned that two barges of material had been shipped to a scrapyard up in Green Island, New York. Friedman and Sons allowed me in, and had two of their men take me around the yard while I took photographs.

I wanted the images to shift into abstractions, biomorphic compositions that would bring a new, perhaps more beautiful life to these tragic remains. Along the way, I found that this was accomplished in many of the original photographs—hence their inclusion. The paintings illustrate different stages of the move away from identifiable imagery.

The collective title of these pieces is “Restless Sky”. A cloudless bright blue sky, once the harbinger of nothing more than a beautiful day, now seems quite different. The two times that I have exhibited pieces from this group (both at galleries in New York City), there were no written references to their origins.

For the past 25 years, my paintings, photographs and objects have all had their origins in discarded machines and outdated technology. These ruminations on the passage of time and obsolescence have parallels in life itself. There is for me a more basic desire to resurrect these decaying materials and imbue them with a new life, albeit in a different arena.

“Industrial Suites” is comprised of images from rail and shipyards in upstate New York and Vermont. The song of these machines has been silenced by time, yet they remain as brute sentinels over scarred landscapes. Once harbingers of the future, their surfaces are testimonials to weather beaten journeys and struggles waged long ago.

In walking through these yards, including the Port of Albany, I am first struck by the silence—punctuated by the distant grinding of still running gears, the muted banging of couplers, and low groans of hulking locomotives. The air is thick with the scent of grain, wood pulp, and spent diesel fuel. These industrial icons are meant to conjure the seductive patina of those abandoned skins.

Stephen Flanagan
New York City, 2007