Religious Rifle Associations
In December, Al Farrow’s show of sculpted churches, temples and mosques built from guns and ammo at Catherine Clark was top-notch. Maybe it was scheduling or just the right somber time of year for it but it seemed like this show deserved to capture more eyeballs than a winter show normally does. The winter season still though is appropriate to a feeling as basic and mute as death itself.
The weight of the steel and aggressiveness of a single gun's metal heft is magnified in these conglomerate architectural models. The mood is poignantly supplemented by bones housed inside. In front of the gallery during the exhibit a full cathedral sheltered a human spine. This wasn't initally apparent but the familiar miniaturization draws you in like any scale model into the context of a crypt or memorial. One wonders where the bones come from and making the anthropromorphic connections to these remains you find yourself entombed psychologically, if only for a moment.
While marveling at the construction of any of Farrow's works there is also obviously the inescapable scent of violence piggybacked by a frail feeling of immortality. Is this a projection of the artist's own personal tragedies or a comment on the dead-hand of religious empire's “desert prejudice”? With the bones they function as reliquaries – equally memorial and creepy.
