Green, Lieutenant Colonel Clifford M. Acree, Iraq, 1991

Portrait of Lieutenant Colonel Clifford M. Acree, U.S. Marine Corps., taken as Prisoner of War (P.O.W.) January 1991, Iraq. A Red Cross plane carrying 35 former allied prisoners of war, including 15 Americans, one of which was Acree, arrived in the Saudi capital of Riyadh on 6 March 1991 after a flight from Baghdad. In turn, 294 Iraqi prisoners flew north to Baghdad, the first released by the allies. As the exchange of prisoners was being carried out, U.S. military officials reported that troops loyal to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein appeared to have regained control of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, and were moving against rebels in other southern cities.
In this work, the right side of his face painted in a realistic style, while the left side is grossly distorted, as if being stretched and pulled by an external force. The work comments on the role of prisoners of war in the progress of the First Gulf War and the way such images were used, by the media, for propaganda purposes. At the same time, her work blends the appearance and disappearance of the subject, caught in a zone of light and space, as if commenting on his lost identity due to his imprisonment. Her images causes us to suspend the recognition of the everyday individual, replaced with a melancholy spectre. Merilyn Fairskye (b.1950) is a painter and lecturer who has used a variety of media in her works, including installations, photography and paint.