American Kills — War and Suicide

The work of designer Sebastian Errazuriz addresses the big issues of life and death, sometimes with a whimsical and charming style, and sometimes with an elegance and simplicity, always posing powerful questions for the observer.

This recent installation, American Kills, is a public showcase of the suicide rates of U.S. soldiers. Errazuriz accidentally found information online that two times more American soldiers had died in 2009 by committing suicide than had been killed during that year in Iraq. He’d never heard this information before, and he was shocked by the lack of attention the statistic had gotten in the media.

The artists’ first thought was to post the information on Facebook, just to get the word out. But he was so moved by the lack of response that he bought a can of black paint and set out to share the news with the world on the wall outside his Brooklyn, New York, studio.

From the artist:

“The counting of dead soldiers outside my studio was long and surprisingly eerie; it was hard to forget that every brush stroke was a soldier who had died the previous year. A lot of people stopped to read the mural and were immediately impressed by the reality portrayed. Most of them seemed quite shocked and approached me to ask if what I was painting was real. I tried to explain that I simply wished to create a physical image that could capture people’s imagination, creating awareness of the current numbers in death, war and the infinite discrepancy between the resources and energies destined to fight and protect soldiers at war versus the energies invested in protecting their mental health and stability.”