Jessica Fenlon : Deconstructing Gun Speech , Silence & Beliefs
By April Greene
“
I think there ’ s a double silence around guns for [ women ]. It ’ s as though they not only have their voices silenced in those moments of abuse — they also feel they lose the right to say anything about it later . — Jessica Fenlon
The first “ unguns ” Milwaukee-based artist
Jessica Fenlon saw were in New Orleans in 2007 . Five years before she began a project that distorts images of guns as a way to neutralize their danger , some friends of hers in Louisiana had retrieved two Smith & Wesson handguns rendered defunct in Hurricane Katrina and turned them into new objects : one became a coat hook , the other a bud vase .
“ There ’ s something that makes you relax when you see that ,” Fenlon says . “ When you see a gun repurposed as something else , but still recognizable as a gun , you relax .”
Fenlon is a visual artist whose primary medium is digital video . Her ideas and observations about these weapons percolated in her imagination for years and coalesced in Chicago in 2012 after
a single weekend in which 14 people were killed with guns . Fenlon began collecting digital images of guns ( eventually amassing over six thousand ) and “ breaking ” each one through a process she calls “ glitch sabotage .”
She employed a computer program to randomly “ decay and degrade ” the images by changing their color , pixelating them , and giving them streaks and shadows . She sourced the images — and the soundtrack , which includes gunshot sounds and gun-centric dialogue — from all over the internet , including
popular films . “ In many movies , guns are so important to the plot , they almost become a character ,” she says .
Fenlon says she has not “ followed the rules for networking into the art world ,” and instead concentrates simply on getting her work in front of viewers . Her intentions for the work itself are similarly no-nonsense .
“ My goal with ungun was to invoke the image of a gun that wouldn ’ t work if it were real ,” Fenlon says . “ There ’ s a feeling of power , of control , in that moment of , ‘ Here ’ s this thing that kills all these people , and I ’ m just going to break a bunch of them !’ It was saying , ‘ Make it go away . This thing can ’ t hurt me right
now .’”
Discomfort with guns was something Fenlon had to learn . Growing up in small town Wisconsin , she went to school with kids whose parents ’ trucks held gun racks ; she learned to shoot at summer camp ; hunting was a popular local sport . Even when she moved to Boston for graduate school , Fenlon saw guns depicted as actors in the oft-referenced American Revolution : again , they were a normal part of the context . But when she moved to Pittsburgh in 2002 , her perceptions began to change .
“ Guns were not as front and center to me in Pittsburgh ,” she says , “ but I did notice there were people showing these emotional behaviors in public that I didn ’ t recognize .” Customers in her local coffee shop , for example , would regularly lash out in disbelief that the cupcakes on display were the only kind available — surely better ones were being saved for other shoppers . Gradually , Fenlon learned that people who had endured the region ’ s infamous U . S .
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