Cold War Nightmares and Dreams of Peace

My friend the artist Allan Harding MacKay and I are working on a joint project book in which Allan digitally manipulates my daily landscape photos of the field and woodland behind my house, often inserting fantastic or apocalyptic narrative inclusions. This piece from last June has become oddly prescient,  featuring as it does an anachronistic 1950’s cold war Russian MIG crashed in our bucolic Canadian setting. The second image is self explanatory; the nightmare dream familiar to all of us who lived our childhoods through the cold war and which we thought had ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall years ago. 

The current conflict in Ukraine has brought round to us all the horror of having to defend one’s homeland from an attack by a foreign aggressor, where even civilians need take up arms. And these fantasy images, the location visible from my kitchen window,  makes personal for me that ugly prospect which we pray will never be visited upon us here in our beautiful and free Canada or anywhere else in the world. My heart is with the brave people of Ukraine from whence my grandfather came.

Alf Bogusky March 2022