Kadie Salfi: Guns of Mass Destruction
By Katie Beeton
Kadie Salfi does not believe we are paying enough attention to gun laws and the impact that these laws have on women. The gun laws are “way too loose” in the artist’s opinion.
Through SNAFU, a collection of life-size replicas of the guns used in American mass shootings from 1966 to present, where five or more people were killed, Salfi explores our country’s troubled relationship with guns. She symbolizes each shooting via a life-size painting of the gun used to commit the act, emphasizing, through the repetition of form, the ubiquity of guns in America.
In presenting the gun over and over again as a work of art, Salfi shows how the object functions as a politically-charged weapon. The granddaughter of a war hero and navigator of a B26 airplane in World War II, Salfi came up with the war acronym ‘SNAFU’ (‘Situation Normal All Fucked Up’) to describe the series.
“I am trying to stimulate conversations about hard subjects that may inspire creative thought, change, and action to alter our relationship with guns,” she says.
Interested in maintaining a relationship between the subject of guns and material, Salfi says that she “always thinks about the form as much as the content.” She works with simple materials, careful to maintain an elegant respect for the subject matter. She is keen not to turn her work into “shock art.” The choice of material holds significance for the artist; the pieces of wood she uses are recycled scraps from the skateboard company Salfi and her husband own. The grain of the wood and the knotted, coalescing marks and crevices which occur naturally over time on the wood’s surface speak to the deeply turbulent and interwoven nature of the mass shootings the artworks address.
The Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 was a catalyzing force in the creation of SNAFU. Salfi, the mother of a young daughter, recalls weeping as she heard a story on the radio about a mother crawling into the still-warm bed of her deceased child, upon hearing the devastating news of the shooting. Salfi drove home to hold her own daughter’s sheets to see if they were still warm. They were. It was a tender and chilling moment for the artist, and one which inspired her to take action. Scared to send her daughter to school the next day and disturbed by how pervasive gun violence had become in America, Salfi decided to focus on the theme of mass shootings in schools as SNAFU evolved.
