Means Without End at Chicago Photography Center

Shannon Benine's installation, Means Without End, featured at the Chicago Photography Center is a surprising conversion from this playful art form. Though her work features hundreds of paper cranes, they are flattened. They appear tormented and deflated into lifelessness.

Benine's dramatic memorial, paying homage to soldiers and their families, is best understood with her introductory explaining. In her own words, each of these "1,200 photograms of peace cranes - folded, exposed and unfolded in total darkness as a meditative protest - attempt to match the death toll." Each peace crane, cautiously folded, mindfully molded, continues to increase along with the number of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan since initial spark of war in March 19, 2003.

A detail of Benine's piece Means Without End

It is ironic how impressively light paper creates such an immensely dark and heavy effect. The destructed crane closely resembles creased prisms, as I interpret, a fingerprint of a soldier's life. The flattened cranes are strewn together to compose a cave-like tent, possibly serving as a paradoxical "refuge" for our American soldiers.

With only enough room for three to stand, claustrophobia is the biggest and most offensive intruder, guarding the brief openness of clean and safe gallery air, attempting to peer inside. A high tech apparatus plays record of dulled echoes of struggling servicemen. It is frightening to listen to resistance to death with muffled language of comrades confirming whether or not they are dead or alive. Most of the words and cries are faint from the inside, completely inaudible from the outside.

Unlike the confined noise within the tent, the flattened cranes spread like a malignant plague into the whole gallery. What serves as symbol of rising death, takes on new perpetual life.

Shannon Benine's installation featured is altogether astonishing, thought and fear provoking. She proves her point masterfully, that the means are truly without end. There is neither near nor clear signs of peaceful amend. Unlike any war commentary I have seen, Benine serves our country in a demonstrative way, fantastically designing and executing both a memorial and protest. Unbeknownst to her in the beginning this unique protest in the years continuing is completely intangible. Death in numbers increases far beyond 5,000.

She leaves a stack of weightlessly thin, black origami paper, dotted with faint lines as guide for me to fold. A somber invitation to participate and meditate in this protest told.