SEAN NEARY WRITES: Inspired by the artificiality of our current American/World Culture, I want to always create work that uses familiar and seemingly already understood images and re-interprets them in the pursuit of a better understanding of what these moments mean to us collectively.

Hopefully, the intent is obvious, but understanding the moments depicted in a deeper and more layered way is the ultimate goal. Layers and more layers and different ways of sticking them together. It goes on and on.

EDITOR BARD COLE WRITES: Whether the images Sean Neary reinterprets have their origin in photojournalism orin public relations, what they all have in common is their use in magazines and newspapers as icons of mythic storytelling. Sean's collage technique strips these images of their depth, their wealth of superficial "realistic" detail — their documentary authority — making them more iconic, and at the same time more dubious, more transparent, more easily interrogated. Their tone can be variously read as comic, satiric, or tragic; but in any case, I consider them gestures toward a more clear-sighted world.

I watched the burning WTC towers collapse from my office window, assuming that this was the day the world would end. As a result, I do not count myself among those people who lately require Hollywood movies to revive memories of what that day was "really" like. Nor, in the past five years, had I found myself unexpectedly lingering over images of the destruction of that day, until I saw Sean's translation, made of torn and cut pieces of color-printed magazine pages, of one widely reproduced photograph. Like a stained glass window in a cathedral, brittle, crystalline, and apocalyptic, it captured something of the surreal and strangely calm end-of-the-world haze that I associate with that day.