they had the misfortune to be doing ordinary things like sitting in a coffee shop or something and somebody decided to put on a suicide vest or to blow up a bus or whatever and he did i felt and i said i feel that it's important to focus our sympathy and our compassion on the victims of terrorism and spend a little bit less time obsessing about people who perpetrate these acts this was a young woman who i believe was at a bus stop outside of a hospital and that's probably what saved her life but she's a college student and she was waiting to get on a bus or she was getting onto the bus when a terrorist walked up to her and there was apparently a watch in his bomb or else the watch was on this hand and came off anyway it cut into her carotid artery that carries fled to the brain all these little marks that you see here this is just a reversal those things are shrapnel they're little pieces probably from a hardware store just cheap easy to easy to acquire objects that people use to pack into these bombs so they blast into other people i fully understand that people are going to fight forever about whatever border disputes are many different things but i noticed today when i turned on the computer eight people were arrested in denmark for having explosives and plants or something then there was a terror attack and i think pakistan twenty five dead this morning when i looked on c n n it's everywhere it's such a successful technique that is being used in many different places for many different reasons and what i would like to do is pull the rug out from under that technique am stacey i work here at the media center and welcome you to the gallery b and see what you just saw with the news piece from when the current exhibit was under splay at stanford university school of medicine this exhibit was done by dan covert have here with me and she's a local artist and she also has an m s w which i think definitely impacts the direction that work is taken through the end of october we have to exhibits here by diane covert we have the expert project and then we have another project called why they left and hopefully we'll have a chance to talk about both of those but i'd like to start with the piece that we just saw you could tell us a little bit about that diane thank you for being here thank you that that was a little piece that was done to try to describe her so the x ray project in the purpose of the x ray project is to shift our attention from the perpetrators of terrorist events attacks to the people who suffer from them to the victims their families their communities and the response of the medical system to try to help these people to my thinking it was at the time was that so much attention was placed on terrorists and their their anger and their motives and whatever that i thought that it was actually in a way encouraging it not intentionally nobody would ever intentionally encourage it but it was reinforcing that behavior and what i what i thought would be better would be to shift attention away from them and focus on the victims who are who are  nameless and just left with trying to put their lives back together what's the timeframe on this when did you start this project i got the idea in two thousand and two i heard i was driving  victim in the piece at all and they had far more sounds in the background it was a very pleasant piece but something was said that i just have never forgotten and what it was was a statement that that this person had participated in the political system that it was a step forward for women and what they were talking about was suicide terrorism and mass murder as as feminism i mean even my teenager recognize that was kind of crazy so i went home and i i looked on line to try to find out who the victim was our victims were and it took over three hours i could not get any information about this poor guy and i finally found him he was i think eighty six years old he was nearly blind  he still like to paint he was an artist in his retirement he could trace his family back to the city of jerusalem for more than ten generations he left behind thirteen children and grandchildren his name was pincus to copley it took hours to learn about him and i just said there's something really really wrong here so you had t incredibly important idea and then how did you begin that how did you well i and the pieces for this i decided that it was really important to present it in a way that people could tolerate looking at it again it's a social work background i didn't want to just traumatized people are overwhelmed people with frankly what amounts to gory news paper images i'm as a photographer are i can get those but can you look at them i don't so people can't and i'm not sure i can some ways so i just realized one day that for a number of reasons radiographs those are x rays and c t scans were the way to go and part of the reason is that they're almost always in black and white and another part of the reason is that they race also show economic status concerns they race religion structures can tell the age usually but most of us can't tell the age certainly ethnicity race religion all of that is gone and what we have left is what we are what holds us together as as people as a community  and then the other aspect is and this is my background in art through the nineteenth century and early parts of the twentieth century when you looked at a portrait you said well what's inside the person what's going on inside with them we had postmodernism which was much more concrete what's inside and it turns out that what's inside is nails and bolts and hex nuts and watches as you saw and at different things so i wanted to present that to the world in a way that we could all understand and have to say it's an incredibly powerful exhibit it's fascinating combination of very intimate but there's also enough of a distance where like you're saying if it was a body you can look at so long in the new legal way you shut your brain down this is a has fascinating mix of intimacy and distance and actually if we could look at some of the pictures and maybe you could tell us a little bit about them as we go along and these are pictures that are part of the exhibit here at the public media center right you know you made a really interesting comment as i was putting the show together i actually thought about different people i wanted to focus on colleges and universities and i  would this be like if you were the sort of person who wanted to be a doctor then you're going to want much closer involvement what if you you know what if you want to be sort of maybe a kindergarten teacher or something like that you maybe you don't  to know it you want to learn it but not necessarily up close and i think it's going to speak to a lot of people in very different ways and here is the first lie this is actually you can't tell from this slide behind us but this is life size if not larger right it's actually even larger and this i call it i was eating pizza because there was a very famous piece a shop that was bombed in jerusalem the spar a pizza shop and there were you know little kids having a birthday party in there but what this is is a lot of different people it's it's the actual x rays that were sent to me put together let's say with a lot of artistic license so if your physician you're saying no this isn't a person but it metaphorically this is represents all of us and and it isn't one individual but it holds together as a person i sadek where i got the e r stuff and had assigned care and i worked with the head of radiology and i got the reality material and they both took a long time making up their minds you can imagine i thought of this in two thousand and two after i heard that piece i mentioned on the radio and i didn't receive the final work until the final x rays until two thousand and five while i presented the show for the first time in two thousand and five and then just called call the hospital or did you have a contact i had people helping me if that's asked and i actually tried to include more countries i tried to get some stuff from india i called the u army and tried to get some civilian stuff from iraq and you know at the time i was told that they were not able to even operate in those areas because it was too dangerous because there was too much terrorism so it was a unique opportunity to present this but i promise you that if somebody blows up a suicide vest in your vicinity it doesn't matter what country you are in or where you're a citizen if you have the same you have exactly the same problem so it is all it's a worldwide problem at this point with the exception of antarctica that's about the only kind that  this is the case that i talked about on the intro this is a young woman and i i think shoot you i know she was in college and for some reason she is at a bus stop outside of i believe karen medical center and that was very fortunate for her because she was very seriously injured or her carotid artery was partially so i heard and i'm from what i understand from the people i've talked  probably would have made it except for there were so many people there right away and they worked on her immediately and were able to save her life so and the next one is is a different way of looking at her at the same patient so this is called a subtraction image and i just it's very abstract looking to us but the there's a tube so the first image  one on the left is frontal and it's a bit lower it's more like this in the one on the right i think is a side view and higher you can see the brain stem though the double line that runs through both images is a feeding t and what you probably what your monitors probably can't pick up is that on the right there's the very faint image of the watch and then the other squares an oblong shapes that are sort of to her brain and you can see sort of bleeding where it shouldn't be and beyond that since i'm not a professional i say this first of all just in the history of modern art we we we have periods where we do very simple things that are very graphic and then we get very broken very involved this is sort of a very modern very graphic type of an image it's it's a calf bone you can see the heel of the foot at the bottom and there's one hex not in there and i just thought that it was a very clean clear way to describe what's going on because every single picture here has two components it has a human being and i see there you know a portrait a head  so this image i talk about all the time and i'm not sure if you can tell what this is but this is a profile if you look at profiles i sometimes when i lecture i throw in a very famous karsh photograph of j f k and he's he's like this in he's in profile it looks the same it's a profile of a human being you see the the knack and there's the job you can see the teeth and the fillings and everything and then there's a nail the nail isn't is you know watched some more next to his his neck and i every image in this show is made up of two pieces there is a human being and then there's something that doesn't belong there but the nail to me is so interesting because it's a very simple tool it's made for putting furniture together  painting pictures on the wall building a house whatever it's constructive it's meant for constructive her businesses and here we have taken it and used it to destroy life you have an interesting statement in the exhibit about the man being the only animal that uses tools yeah i'm not sure that's true i was going to read it all yeah but it's an interesting it's a heartbreaking way to look at tools and things right into it so what so what happens when a terrorist goes to home depot or whatever the equivalent is they buy nails and bolts and hex that it costs nothing and then they mix it with some sort of an explosive and they're not only killing themselves but they're killing other people with things that are meant way to create something positive in the world and every image it has is twofold not only the fact that it's a person an object but it's also a malevolent decision to try to commit murder and then a response to it a civilized response that is very altruistic made up of doctors and nurses and first responders all those people then the x ray technologists and the radiologists that are reading it the surgeons who do the work then the after care people and all the psychologists in the community support they're in every single one of the see these images if you are trying to if you think about it if you see it and nothing in the middle you see it's just the two extremes of behavior the person that wants to save lives the person that wants to destroy that life and nothing you know they put them together first installations i did was at harvard medical school and the one on left in particular there is a very badly broken leg and you can see there's some hex nuts at the bottom and then sort of in the middle it's just all shattered but one of the students there said to me that he had had a skiing accident or something and had a badly broken leg but not this badly and he said he couldn't bear to look at it because he could just feel the pain and i i don't know that when we read the news articles and so there was a bombing in thailand sometimes wherever  if people really stop to think those were people who who had this happen to them you know if you twist an ankle it's miserable and insulation this is this is part of what we saw in the original video that this is an installation it's a large square a shape it's literally the inside so clearly you're looking at the x rays right and you can walk around in them and it lets it depends on the shape of the space becomes less important because we can just move those boxes around we can move the key and we call them kiosks we can move them by the way my husband steve cover designed the chaos in there they're brilliant but nobody  it together but other than that they're great and this is really interesting to me when the show was at stanford i was fortunate enough to get a tour from the guy who's the head of the radiology program there and he wanted to tell me what was going on in my slides so that i could share them with other people as i toured the show and he particularly pulled this one out now this is an arm you can see the elbow and you can see the hands he said this is one of the worst injuries he said actually it's the worst injuries ever seen in his entire career and he runs a trauma cent because the main artery is cut off it becomes life threatening that said black line it should be filled in it's empty it's sort of almost clear but he was pointing out the the number of breaks that are all up and down the arm and in the hand and he said that the force and the repetition of the force wishes for we difficult even for somebody like him to look at and think about  mile so i always show it and i always talk about it and again the shapes the the sort of rectangular shapes those are things from home depot or i don't mean to pick on home depot about hardware store those are things you have vest and this one i just find so interesting again this is why you have to use x rays or c t scans rather than photographs because if you can imagine it the upper left is the hip and the leg of an individual and then you add so and you see the blood vessels but there are i believe nineteen or twenty hex nuts in there so if you were to think about them and in a photograph they are actually making holes in the person coming through all up and down the legs right but the problem is not the hex nuts per se the problem is that it's cutting off part of this artery and in order to save the leg they need to find and i guess it's a really delicate surgery they need to remove it so they go closer the second one is closer and then the third one you can see that fat black line there's a little bit of this white tear in it and that's the problem they need to fix sad and i hope that they did i think they did and actually  that at that looking at that closely that's actually a beautiful it would be beautiful painting are beautiful photograph it looks it's delicate it's balanced if you didn't know what that was and you saw that as a painting you just  wonderful that's one of the funny things about the show so the x rays tend to be very pretty they often are especially if you don't know what you're looking at and you can interpret that now this this is running parallel with another show that we have here and they're all in this other show why they left why they left why they left if you could tell us a little bit about that ok why they left is in its infancy so it's a very early  show about why large groups of people end up leaving their home their what i call their host country because they flee like maybe from the sudan today they're if they're running certain groups or running in terror and order to live and i got to thinking about it partly from the x ray project i did run into some anti semitism on the college campuses not a lot but it occasionally it happened and it caused me to think about how groups because minorities how they become scapegoated and then how sometimes the sort of regional geopolitical reality forces them to have to run for their lives and the group that i am working with first is i guess the predecessor of the biggest bulk of the american jewish community so most american jews and i'm one of us and not all of us but most of us our grandparents or great grandparents spending our age fled from eastern europe what was called the pale of settlement it was an area that was regionally controlled by russia but a lot of these people were running from ukraine lots of us from ukraine or various other places and there were these waves what's called pogroms and a program is and lynching kind of in an american context we would it's very similar to a mob attacking a small community it is a mob attacking a small community and i guess in the american context we would think about it that way and in fact part of my decision to go with this project had to do with looking at the sort of wonderful improvements from my childhood till today in understanding racism and understanding slavery and that happened because a lot of education happened and it happened in the classroom so i decided that a lot of people who know about the programs who actually know about why people were leaving are getting old and we have to start collecting the information and i was given a trove of images to work with her and they're very rare photographs and i think when you look at those photographs you understand why people felt they had to run away or the sort of people had that they'd saved from their ancestors yeah they were in an archive in russia and they were photographs of some of them are made by perpetrators so they're just i do this tri city it's almost as if they're saying i caught a big fish but what i did ok there at that level one of the photographs in the exhibit a mass grave of women just lined up with the the women's bodies lined up the dirt ready to be covered obviously that wasn't the perpetrators that was probably the townspeople grade the photographs before the  some of them are medical people who are making these are documenting so there is some of the phone the graphs are were obviously made by by skilled photographers and some of the photographs were made by people who just had whatever the equivalent was of a little point and sheer you know and they just took them but and so some of the photographs are sympathetic and compassionate and some of them are just very cold  this is it and some of them are you know border bordering on gleeful you know and my contention is that this happens from time to time around the world and there are different groups of people and and we shouldn't erase  them we shouldn't a race some we shouldn't forget our own history any more than we should forget the history of slavery in our own country or or any of these other events they're very important legist want to reiterate this is an amazing exhibit and really encourage people to come see it you have a website where people can look at the x ray project if they'd like some information on that and that's its x dash re project all one word x ray project dot org and once again this exhibit will be at the belmont media center through our through october twenty first and we encourage you to come down and see it it's amazing i want to thank you so much for letting us show the so you said this is hasn't been shown in this area before the entire x ray project has been it be you it was at harvard medical school there are parts of it have been at b c it has been in the area but it has certainly it hasn't been in belmont  it hasn't been here for a few years so it's fresh for this area this time well thank you for coming in is there anything you want to say in closing i know you think you've covered a lot of information that's really important this is  basement because i wanted a sense of what i looked at the images i wanted a sense of what's represented in these images what what is a hex net and i wondered why there were so many hacks that it turns out they're