Reforming the Guns
Reforming the guns is a series of photos that explore ways in which the original images of guns can be altered in ways that neutralize some of the negativity, often associated with them, and still maintain some of their original presents as objects.
As an artist I have always thought that certain kinds of guns (looked at purely as objects) are quit beautiful. Of course this viewpoint requires me to dissociate myself from the harm that guns can and have often done as weapons of war.
The beauty I see in some guns originates for me from their extreme functionality. In most cases, these objects look the way they do because they are made to do one thing as efficiently as possible, and that is to fire bullets.
In this series I have photographed various kinds of guns with a digital camera. Those photos were then placed into my computer where the images of the guns were isolated from their backgrounds. The isolated gun images were duplicated many times and layered on top of one another. Each of the layered images was then altered with the computer in various ways in order to form many different kinds of abstractions of the original images. As a contrast, in most of the photos, a section of the abstract montage is made up from a series of the original gun images that have not been altered. Also, in some of the photo montages, two different kinds of guns have been merged together forming a composite abstraction.
Status: Built
Location: Santa Fe NM
