In Focus

Omer Fast’s film Five Thousand Feet Is Best takes its name from an excerpt of an interview between Fast and a Predator Drone aerial vehicle operator, now living and working in Las Vegas as a casino security guard. The operator recalls his jobs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, activating the unmanned plane to fire at civilians and militia from the optimum height of 5,000 feet.

Once the recording is on and the tape is rolling, I become so self-conscious. Why is that?

Willie Doherty creates art that is at once unsettling and beautiful, an art shaped by the background of the Troubles in his native Northern Ireland but which communicates across all borders to any receptive viewer. Taking no sides in a highly demarcated face-off, Doherty has unstintingly portrayed through photography and media installations the intense, often crushing psychological and physical effects of that conflict and the part that words and images have played in those effects.

The following essay is excerpted from the 2007 exhibition catalogue Fast Forward: Contemporary Collections for the Dallas Museum of Art, which showcased promised bequests of the Hoffman, Rachofsky, and Rose families, in conjunction with works from the Museum's previously acquired contemporary holdings.