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This past weekend, I saw political messages and images of violence printed on pulped military uniforms. Ash Street Project’s Deconstructing the Divide featured prints and other art from Iraq War veterans, much of it printed on what the artists and exhibitors call “combat paper”—some of the veterans pulped their own uniforms, turned them into paper, and then used that paper to create art.

A bit of hard honesty: I can’t say that I was blown away by the art in and itself. Had I encountered many of the prints without knowing the circumstances behind their creation, I probably wouldn’t have given them too much thought. But, knowing that images of war, politics, and violence were made by the very people whose lives were upended by war, politics, and violence does give the work a whole lot more heft. Plenty of artists have painted guns or flags or war-torn landscapes. However, when you know that the art was created by someone who was trained to use a service rifle (or who was shot at), or had to wear a flag on their sleeve, or who helped create or had to endure that war-torn landscape—the context of those images changes. During the show I kept thinking that the various images were certainly earned.

Aaron Hughes, one of the artists whose work was on display, was deployed to Iraq and Kuwait with the Illinois Army National Guard in 2003 and 2004. He characterized the experience of creating art as "creating meaning out of trauma" and said that "trauma was a lack of meaning." Talking to him, it was entirely easy to see what he meant, and to imagine a generation of veterans turning their pain (and uniforms) into something that we all could observe.