No Safe Place

No Safe Place: A Collaborative Project About Gun Culture

Guns no background

The weapons manufacturing industry’s current marketing strategy depends on the polarization between anti-gun proponents and gun enthusiasts: The more fear and friction that exists between the two sides, the more demand there is for sales of firearms. I believe if we cannot create a productive dialogue about this issue, no change will occur in our society.

IMG_1633My art aims to encourage dialogue between these opposing viewpoints about gun culture and gun control in America through collaborative conceptual pieces that involve audience participation.  In July 2012, when a mentally ill gunman opened fire in a theater in Aurora, Colorado, I was sleeping less than five miles away. As an artist I immediately felt a responsibility to respond to what I considered an exponentially escalating social problem. Thus began my current project on gun violence and gun ownership.

I began by making large-scale drawings of guns, which then led me to the streets to find out what others were thinking about this issue. I would ask both strangers and friends to make their own drawings of guns, which I collected and then used to interactive gun drawingsmake large-scale collages and works of art. Later, I turned to my own rural community in Colorado and began to have dialogues with my own friends, neighbors, and acquaintances to discover who owned, used, and collected assault weapons. I spoke with gun-owners candidly on why they own them. I borrowed weapons from their collections to create artifacts of our conversations, which I then incorporate into art installations that merge performance, video, art objects, and sound.

My project is about  creating dialogue about gun culture and the proliferation of weapons in the US. I believe art has the potential to help us find  new ways to look at and theorize gun culture in the US.