Who Are You … My Enemy?

On view in San Francisco is The Enemy Project. It’s a portable art installation displayed in the rear courtyard of Saint Gregory’s Episcopal Church, on Portreo Hill.

With the intention to bridge the gap between “friend and foe,” the installation, simply called “My Enemy,” is a creative and spiritual expression of artist team, Yisrael Feldsott and Dee O’Neal.

From MyEnemy.org

My Enemy challenges us to consider the “other” as something more than different. It engages our old stories, opinions, and values about justice: across cultural and religious divides, among sexual, racial, and gender identities, toward wilderness sustainability, for prisoners and outcasts, and in view of inequality.

The installation ensemble is comprised of human-scale, sculpted, wood and metal panels of chained-up prisoners and prison guards with machine guns, with what appears to be angels of death on either side. To this, in the center, painted wooden white doves with abstract colorful details are entangled in barbed wire fences in front of the prisoners and prisons guards.

The installation is partially participatory, in that visitors and observers of the piece are invited to paint their own unique dove with paint supplied by the artists.

In the context of ongoing wars happening around the world, revelations about injustice in our justice system, and so much individual and collective upheaval over those who have and have not, “My Enemy” offers up a creative, non-threatening and interactive way to ask each of us to “consider the aspects of humankind and the everyday struggles that we all share.”

Now having launched, “My Enemy” will continue to travel to dozens of sites across the United States in its planned 10,000 mile journey. And along with major cities, scheduled stops include Pine Ridge, South Dakota, which is the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre, and Sanford, Florida, the hometown of slain African-American teenager, Trayvon Martin.