Mixed media on wood
74.93cm X 118.11cm (29.5” X 46.5”)

Genghis Khan was the George Washington of Mongolia. Alexander the Great was Attila the Hun to Persians. Columbus is Hitler to Dominicans. And Truman, the Anti-Christ to the denizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After Osama bin Laden was killed I read an apocryphal piece of journalism on his life in the Pakistani compound. It claimed he had been an avid gardener and wore a sombrero outdoors to hide from the peering eyes of drones and spy planes. The piece also claimed he had tomato-growing contests with his grandkids. When I Googled it later I got nothing but pot plants and opium.

As a small child my grandfather’s past was incidental to me or at the least, unknown. I knew he’d been a boxer in the army in Hawaii. The tattoos on his arms illustrated he’d lived a life different from my parents. What if I discovered he had committed atrocities in a foreign lands?

Later, when I discovered two interviews published by Al Jazeera and the Pakistani newspaper Ummat Karachi where bin Laden denied involvement in the planning and execution of 9/11, as well as the findings of BYU physicist Steven E. Jones and nine other authors published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal on the presence of nano-thermitic materials in 911 dust, I began to see bin Laden as a fall guy.

My grandfather had also been maligned -for his lack of religiosity, his drinking, his smoking and even the accusations of infidelity in his youth.

For me, he was only grandpa, a god who grew tomatoes in summer.

Mixed media on wood frame and glass
47.62cm X 57.78cm (18.75” X 22.75”)

Āghā-Soltān’s bloody, panicked last moments, captured by a mobile-phone camera and uploaded to the Internet, turned into probably the most widely witnessed death in human history.

Time 

Time magazine wrote that the murder of Nedā Āghā-Soltān was “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history.” On June 20 Nedā was shot in the chest while observing a protest of the outcome of the 2009 Iranian presidential election. The shooter, Abbas Kargar Javid, was a pro-government member of the Basij Militia. Hamid Panahi, the music teacher who was with her at the time of her death stated, “She couldn’t stand the injustice of it. All she wanted was the proper vote of the people to be counted.”

I’m not drawn to Nedā because she is a poster girl for the Iranian Green Movement. According to those who knew her she had no interest in politics.

Nedā was an underground singer and musician. Her name means voice. Like a lot of artists she didn’t fit in. She had left her studies from Islamic Azad University over pressure on her style, or specifically, the way she dressed. She had divorced her husband for whatever reasons. She was strong willed.

At the time of her death she was engaged to Caspian Makan, a photojournalist. Now she’s iconic like Joan of Arc or Che Guevara: an advertisement for martyrdom.

I remember her more like the poet Garcia Lorca who was murdered during the Spanish Civil War. Lorca’s death was not recorded with a smartphone like the other 34 Iranian protesters who died the day Nedā was murdered in Tehran. Like Lorca, Neda was not a guerrilla or a revolutionary, a soldier or a policeman, or anyone who believes the problems of humanity can be solved with a bullet.

When I first viewed the video of her death on youtube I wanted to annihilate the man or men or armies of men who were responsible. But I’m not a killer. I just paint on random objects. Later I rewatched the video to witness the exact moment she disappears from us and to possibly understand where she had gone. What I saw was her eyes roll from a place of terror into the nothing of her cranium. When the irises reappeared I saw two black dots deeper than shadow, the eyes of Kali.