Jessica Fenlon: Deconstructing Gun Speech, Silence & Beliefs
By April Greene
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.
The result was a six-and-a-half-minute video titled ungun that’s been shown in 20 exhibitions internationally since 2013. In some cases, Fenlon submitted the work to European video festivals that had no particular thematic focus. In others, like curator Susanne Slavick’s touring group show UNLOADED, which explores the impact of guns in American culture, ungun was recruited specifically for its content. Last September, the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, hosted a new media exhibition in response to the June mass shooting in Orlando, Florida. The organizers sought work they thought would become a focal point for conversation; ungun was ideal.
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.’”
