Yesterday’s news, remembered today
Stephen Andrews
war drawings 2003-2005
March 27 - April 25, 2026
See below for full titles of certain artworks.
Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to present Yesterday’s news, remembered today, an exhibition by Stephen Andrews focused on his Iraqi war drawings from 2003-2005.
"Intuitively, I was drawn to ordering that chaos in the same way that my previous work had been trying to rationalize or grapple with grief - the work that I made in the eighties and nineties in response to the AIDS epidemic. That was a collective grief. The impulse I had after 9/11 was the same: to start ordering things. Searching the internet was a much more complicated process at that point in time." --Stephen Andrews, 2018, Aftermath, McMichael Canadian Art Collection
"Like everyone, I have been both fascinated and horrified by the news coverage of the war in Iraq. In early 2003, I started searching the internet for photographic evidence of the war that was not being reported in the mainstream press. Web-based news sites offered a rather different picture. Photos of 'collateral damage' captured the obscenity of war in all its pornographic detail. In the wake of Abu Ghraib, these images are now ubiquitous. Like all pornographic and violent pictures, they tap into something instinctual, eliciting some gesture in response.
Like my paintings, the drawings re-create the look of four-color reproduction using a homemade separation technique. They are done as rubbings using window screening and crayons. The process softens the colors to a pastel palette, reminiscent of children's book illustration. The contrast of the war imagery with the pastel color scheme brings to mind the moral tales of the Brothers Grimm. Gruesome lessons in a candy coating.
Websites, like newspapers and magazines before them, deliver us the world in a neat four-color package. By directing our gaze to the dots that make up the pictures, I hope to interrogate the technological interface that delivers the message, to reveal through formal means the role that technology plays in constructing meaning. In the process of re-creating these digital images by hand, I want to explore the inevitable tension between my subjectivity (the hand of the artist) and these objectified digital 'moments'." --Stephen Andrews, 2004, Stephen Andrews, Cue Art Foundation, NYC (Link is a downloadable compressed pdf)
Stephen Andrews was born in 1956 in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. His work deals with memory, identity, technology and their representations in various media including photography, drawing, animation, painting and ceramics. Over the last twenty five years he has exhibited his work across Canada, the U.S., Brazil, Scotland, France, Italy and Japan, including POV, a fifteen-year survey at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2015). He is represented in collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Belkin Art Gallery, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, the Schwartz Collection, Harvard amongst many others, and corporate art collections including Torys (Toronto), Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt (Toronto), the Royal Bank of Canada, National Bank of Canada, TD Canada Trust and the Bank of Montreal. Andrews is a recipient of the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts (2019).
Full Titles:
Dramatis personae 1 2004
The photographs published by the Daily Mirror newspaper, which appeared to show British soldiers urinating on and beating an Iraqi prisoner, were confirmed to be a hoax. The Daily Mirror eventually admitted on May 14, 2004, that the pictures were a "calculated and malicious hoax". As a result of the scandal, the newspaper's editor, Piers Morgan, was fired.
2004 crayon rubbing on parchment paper 24 x 19 inches
Dramatis personae 2 2004
On March 31, 2004, four American private military contractors working for Blackwater Security Consulting—Scott Helvenston, Jerko Zovko, Wesley Batalona, and Michael Teague—were ambushed and killed in Fallujah, Iraq. Their bodies were mutilated, dragged through the streets, and two were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River, triggering the First Battle of Falluja.
2004 crayon rubbing on parchment paper 24 x 19 inches
Hotel bombing (2003)
The Canal Hotel bombing was a suicide truck bombing in Baghdad, Iraq, during the afternoon of 19 August 2003. It killed 23 people, including the United Nations' Special Representative in Iraq Sérgio Vieira de Mello, and wounded over 100, including human rights lawyer and political activist Amin Mekki Medani. The attack targeted the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq created just five days earlier. The attack resulted in the withdrawal within weeks of most of the 600 UN staff members from Iraq. These events were to have a profound and lasting impact on the UN's security practices globally.
2003 crayon rubbing on Mylar 17 ¾ x 25 ¾ inches
The arrival of the Americans 1 2003 crayon rubbing on Mylar 19 x 24 inches
The arrival of the Americans 2 2003 crayon rubbing on Mylar 16 x 24 inches
The arrival of the Americans 3 2003 crayon rubbing on parchment paper 19 x 24 inches
March 2003, U.S. forces opened a northern front in Iraq, primarily involving special operations and the 173rd Airborne Brigade. They allied with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters to fight against Iraqi forces, secure oil fields, and prevent Iraqi troops from moving south. Key actions included the parachute drop into Bashur (Operation Northern Delay) on March 26 and the Battle of Debecka Pass.