Arresting Images
Curator Karen Indeck sought diversity, and she found one photographer, Nancy Floyd, whose subjects in an ongoing series, “Stopping Power,” are proud women gun owners. Carolyn Saul, Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum, and Bumper shows a smiling woman holding a large gun in a homey-looking living room, dog at her feet, TV and fireplace behind–a setting that reminds us that guns are accepted parts of many homes and lives. In a written statement visible on the wall, Saul declares that she’s comfortable with her gun and is ready to use it against an intruder. Some might cite statistics that guns in homes are far more likely to kill family members than criminals, but the photo and statement accurately represent a familiar American attitude.
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When other artists here depict guns, they often try to defuse their potential for injury, transforming them into something else or literally covering them up. Oddly this approach can create an aesthetic contradiction: guns’ natural projective power is set against the artists’ containers for them. Bradley McCallum in Adrenaline encases a handgun (which he obtained from the New Haven police) in a block of Lexan, a transparent material similar to Plexiglas. Printed on one side of the block is the mournful statement of a woman whose son was killed, and on the other are the words of the man charged with the murder, who speaks of the thrill of shooting, of the “adrenaline running through you.” By positioning the gun between the two texts, McCallum declares it an object carrying disturbingly different meanings for different people.
Davis & Davis dramatize domestic violence in Tearful/Earful, part of a series called “Modern Romance” in which this husband-wife team photograph themselves in posed situations. This photo shows Scott Davis in profile yelling into the ear of Denise Davis, who’s slicing an onion; she has tears streaming down her cheeks. One thinks immediately of spousal abuse, yet the onion and the woman’s straight-ahead gaze suggest that the man isn’t really upsetting her–that she’s manufacturing her tears. This seems a metaphor for the emotions people fake, and in fact the “tears,” which are too regularly spaced to seem real, are applied glycerin, further removing the scene from actuality. The effect of this artifice is finally a bit like that of Kapon’s furry guns: in the Davises’ postmodern treatment, violence is defused to the point of silliness.
