Corrupted Eagle

This 2009 etching with relief begins a sequence of works in which Heyman turns to the American eagle as a politically charged emblem rather than a heraldic ornament. Made in the year following the closing months of the Bush administration's second term, and during a period of continued scrutiny of American conduct that followed the Abu Ghraib disclosures Heyman had documented in his Amman and Istanbul Portfolios, the print reads the eagle through corruption rather than through patriotism. The technique combines etching with relief on paper, placing copper-plate line and woodblock impression on the same sheet and requiring the two matrices to print in registration. The relief element provides broad area while the etching articulates feather and detail. The work precedes the 2010 and 2011 photographers and eagles prints in which Heyman would extend the motif into a sustained meditation on press freedom and the wounding of state symbols. As an early use of the bird in his iconography, Corrupted Eagle establishes both the visual vocabulary and the political framing the subsequent prints develop.