Artist Depicts Juarez Violence In Book

They are the images that nightmares are made of.

And they’re how artist Alice Leora Briggs depicts the violence in Juarez.

“Every time you make a mark, you make a light on the dark across the surface,” Briggs said on Good Morning El Paso Sunday.

Chiseled with a knife into white clay, those works make that mark both literally and figuratively, Briggs said.

“They’re cuts – down through a surface. It’s like a form of surgery. You sort of try to cut through the situation and see what’s going on.”

What’s going on with drug traffickers, and both the Mexican and American governments, are what author Charles Bowden’s book “Dreamland: The Way Out of Juarez” chronicles, with Briggs’ illustrations.

“I’m very interested in situations that bring out extremes in human behavior,” she said.

“I’ve met people in Juarez who are saints, to my mind. And people who – for entertainment – would just as soon blow your brains out.”

Both those kinds of characters appear with painstaking detail.

On one page, a man wields a knife.

On another page, an elderly couple tries to maintain normalcy amid chaos.

Images of guns and bullet holes also feature prominently.

“The truth of actually being there, and walking on this ground, and smelling this place, is so different,” she said.

Different, from many second-hand accounts Briggs hears on this side of the border.

It’s that dissonance she’s trying to cut through – one knife stroke at a time.