Honoring the fallen

Editor’s note: Molly Glentzer, the Chronicle’s ever-busy, nearly omnipresent arts writer, recently began posting daily examinations of singular art pieces on the Gray Matters website. Here are two of Glentzer’s recent observations. Read the daily installm

‘Fallen Soldiers’

The artist: Alicia Dietz

Where: Through May 28 at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in the show “United by Hand: Work and Service by Drew Cameron, Alicia Dietz and Ehren Tool”

Why: Some artists obsess over drawing lines. Dietz’s lines form names, inked onto canvas, wood and other materials. And the names never end.

A U.S. Army veteran who flew a Blackhawk helicopter over Baghdad during her first assignment in 2001, Dietz served 10 years that included time as a maintenance test pilot and company commander in Alaska, Germany and Egypt. She’s worked on “Fallen Soldiers” since she attended graduate school, paying tribute to fellow soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan by writing their names onto objects she has created, including carved combat boots, a weapon, a fabric-covered helmet and sandbags.

That’s 6,866 names and counting, since Oct. 10, 2001. She continues to add names as “penance” — her word, which troubles me.

Dietz’s “Collective Cadence” installation covers much of the floor with framed shadow boxes that contain images and text etched in glass and printed on aluminum, drawn from the stories of 117 active-duty soldiers, veterans and spouses. These are organized by blood type, reflecting the information on dog tags. Dietz continues to collect these stories, too. For a deep dive, visitors can choose a card and focus on one or a few. Reading them all would consume hours, maybe even days.

With “Reintegration/ Conveyance,” Dietz invites visitors to sit for a while and meditate. At the heart of the piece, on a plank platform, sits a mission-style chair she created using her uniform as upholstery material. But it’s not as simple as it first looks, detailed with elements that convey her own story about the challenges of rejoining civilian society after time in the military.

Ehren Tool and Drew Cameron, the show’s other featured artists, also grapple with reducing the enormity of war to a human scale. Tool’s war-themed ceramic cups, each representing a human life, fill a wall. He’s made and given away more than 18,000 of them to date. (A Houston giveaway is scheduled for Memorial Day weekend, when the show closes.) Cameron makes paper from old clothing — including military uniforms from multiple people — that has been beaten to a literal pulp and merged into one object.

“There is a story in each of us,” Dietz told curator Kathryn Hall. “We are individuals and … part of a collective at the same time.”

All three artists have visited Houston for community workshops. Ultimately, it’s the collective that counts, in war or the comfort of a peaceful city.

Alicia Dietz’s “Fallen Soldiers,” top, and detail, above, is presented in “United by Hand” at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Jeremy Zietz photos