Linda Lighton: “Taking Aim” on Gun Culture
By Mackenzie Leighton
When face to face with I don’t want a bullet to kiss your heart, you cannot escape looking down the barrel of a gun, or rather, being confronted by its omnipresence. A portal formed by two arches greets you with hundreds of ceramic guns glazed in a muted yellow pigment, as if gold could rust.
This sculpture by Linda Lighton serves as the focal point of the 2012 exhibition “Taking Aim,” at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri. The ambiguity of the work reflects a distinctly American attitude towards guns: we simultaneously glorify and condemn them as they repel and lure us in.
Lighton is a Kansas City-based ceramic artist who has been practicing art full time since 1973. For the past seven years, she has produced social commentary on gun violence, and its presence in her community serves as a catalyst in her practice. In 2010, her husband saw a six-person shootout at 8:30 on a Monday morning while driving to her studio located near Troost Avenue, a major racial and economic dividing line. Lighton was shocked to find that there had been no news coverage following the incident and became concerned for the safety of her neighborhood.
When she started researching gun violence in Kansas City, Lighton was struck by lack of activism around the overwhelming statistics; in 2011, Kansas City was named the 9th most dangerous city in the country, with the crime rate at more than three times the national average. Six years after Kansas repealed requirements for background checks in 2007, the gun homicide rate was 16% higher, while the national average had decreased by 11%.
“You have to keep the conversation alive,” she tells me, “because there is no conversation. The job often of an artist is to reflect whats going on in society.”
Her sculpture, Love and War: The Ammunition II, explores the intersection of gender and gun violence by showcasing bullets that double as lipstick tubes. The idea came to Lighton after her former intern began working at a bullet factory in Kansas City. Upon seeing photographs of various types, Lighton noticed the strange resemblance of the heat seeking bullet to a lipstick tube. Thus, she equates an object of war and destruction with one of cultural femininity and beauty standards. Modern City State places lipstick tube bullets alongside guns, revealing the allure of such objects and how their synthesis dismantles conventional ideas of masculinity.
