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My Dad's Gun Collection 2002-present (work in progress)
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There is a
moment before or just at the first awareness of an occurrence of
violence where the brutal outcome can be known or imagined. It’s
an instant of stillness, suspension, where nothing has yet happened but
dread sets in. Some of the film loops, photographs, and
sculptures I have made imply this quiet moment or else they imply
possible violence but they never cross the line into action and so
remain innocent. The lacy filigreed gun sculptures I have been making
out of sugar or porcelain function in a similar way, as they lay
prettily inert in their cases.
These sculptures also embody a basic ambivalence toward guns that is
particularly American, though not specific to America. (A friend who
had grown up in Lebanon during the 70’s looked at one of the small
caliber sugar handguns I’d sculpted out of sugar and expressed a
similar casual view of them as he said that Oh yes, his mom had one
just like that that when he was young that he saw her put in her purse
whenever she went out at night. I asked him if he knew about the
gun, if he knew what kind it was, relvolver or pistol, etc. but he’d
been a child when he saw her putting it into her handbag and so he
simply accepted its presence. It wasn’t something she talked
about but with his child’s openness he accepted it as something she
needed to take with her without worrying about the implications of why
she would need a gun.) The mixed message sent by a dangerous
object like a gun being made in a fragile material like sugar or
porcelain is a reflection of my own mixed feelings of desire and
nostalgia and apprehension toward guns.
“My Dad’s Gun Collection” (a work in progress) is a piece I
started working on after a few years of making other gun sculptures
from sugar and porcelain. After all, it’s the memory of seeing
one of my dad’s guns when I was very young that prompted me to start
making guns in the first place. I’d already been working with
delicate materials to make sculpture and the whiteness of the sugar and
porcelain is inherent to those materials—lending whatever I made from
them an ethereal feel. I was thinking about guns in general at
the time (shootings were in the news a lot right about then) and then I
started thinking about how I was fascinated with my dad’s guns when I
was a child. The gun sculptures I make are lacy, white, and light -
exactly opposite in appearance to the pistol my brother found hidden in
Mom and Dad’s bedroom one afternoon.
The guns were around, I’d heard a little about them, knew they were
dangerous, but I rarely saw one. I knew there were hunting rifles
my father kept but the more compelling ones were the handguns that we
had been told were very dangerous and that were kept hidden from us
children. Despite Dad’s good intentions of keeping the handgun
they had for protection tucked away in my parent’s bedroom, my younger
brother, who confessed as a grown-up to being a snoop who periodically
searched my parents drawers, found it. I was sitting that
afternoon on the couch that was at the bottom of the stairway, probably
watching cartoons on the television, though what I was actually doing
escapes me. My brother came walking slowly down the stairs
balancing in his outstretched hands a pistol---it looked huge in his
hands, heavy, and the metal was so black that it seemed to absorb the
light. He was very young, perhaps 4 or 5 and I was 2 years older.
I watched in silent fascination as he descended the stairs taking each
step carefully and he glanced up at me and said “Look what I found.” I
remember sitting stunned on the couch and calling my mother, and I
think the tone of my voice let her know she should come quickly.
She came from the kitchen and promptly took it away. My brother
probably joined me on the couch then to watch cartoons. For years
after that the pistol was a topic of conversation and together my
brother and I would go to my parent’s bedroom and look everywhere for
it, though the guns were better hidden after that and we never found it
again.
Strangely, my brother’s knack for finding the guns hidden in my
parent’s house still lingers. A few years ago we were all home
for a summer holiday with our own children and families. My
brother happened to open a drawer next to the easy chair in the living
room and there was one of Dad’s pistols he’d forgotten to put away
before the grandchildren arrived, lying quietly. Without much
fanfare he took it out and asked Dad to put it away and that was the
end of it. We still have the acceptance of the gun’s
presence we developed as children.
After I started sculpting the guns I eventually had to broach the topic
with my parents because of course my father especially was quite aware
that the gun imagery probably has something to do with his own guns and
he alluded to this—eventually opening the door to more stories about
them being told (as well as there being more arguments between us about
the politics of gun control in the U.S. We can agree on some
things but others seem to set us at opposite ends of the
spectrum). I ended up telling them how the time I saw the
forbidden handgun in my brother’s hands had stayed with me and prompted
some of my work. My Mom then told a story of how when we were
very young, whenever my Dad went away on business trips, she slept with
a gun under her pillow for protection. One night she woke up from
a nightmare about “robbers” as she called them and thought she saw
someone standing at the end of her bed. As she was reaching for
the gun, the image faded as she fully awakened and she realized the
intruder was just the remnants of her dream. She said she never
slept with a gun under the pillow again because we children wandered
into her bedroom at night sometimes and she didn’t want to wake up
confusedly from a deep sleep and reach for the gun when her children
were in the room.
I called my father a while ago and asked him to give me a list of the
guns he owns-I wasn’t sure how many or what types he had. He sent
me a list and I saw that there are 14 in all and it’s a collection
reflects the various meanings and uses a gun has in American
culture. The rifles and shotguns are mostly for hunting while the
handguns reflect a fear of an intruder or danger on the street-these
were purchased for protection. One or two guns are probably simply
interesting models or collector’s items.
I’ve made 9 of the pieces from his collection so far and have displayed
them laying in a case-the whiteness and silence of the sculptures take
them away from their potentially violent origins. As I work on
this piece I indulge my fascination with the guns and the mystery they
hold for me as objects that I was never allowed to touch when I was
young. The moment of stillness that occurs before an act of
violence is reflected in the sculptures themselves as it exists in the
memory of the gun in my brother’s hands-it is drawn out endlessly,
allowing for a prolonged contemplation, and in both cases the potential
violent result never comes.
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for
a statement about the work click here
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