Armed and Alarmed

Rita Valley, Only the Oligarchs

The Five Points Gallery on Main Street in Torrington, CT offers a couple shows this month reflecting on American cultures of violence. Rita Valley creates fabric collages that frequently feature texts emblazoned on materials bent far from their original purposes. “Only the Oligarchs,” is particularly eloquent because it leaves the viewer to speculate where that phrase might apply.  Written in a flowing old school script with golden halo outlines, the rather frilly handling of the phrase contrasts with the deliberately masculine rhetoric of a forest camouflage material used as the base. The hanging itself is suspended with crystal chandelier baubles, again underlining the crazy gender coding of materials that supposedly renders this thing girly and that thing masculine. The forest backdrop consists of odd, gnarly vines that seem to be sprouting balls of cotton rather than the intended snow cover. And what is only for the oligarchs? Siberia, if they annoy Putin? America in its post-democracy version dominated by Silicon valley billionaires? And just to be sure you know it’s for men, mc2 is scrawled across the fabric. Are these guys really so potent that they can ride the energy of their power as mass times light squared? 

Rita Valley, Silence is Violence

Another engaging Valley wall hanging attracted a lot of attention with its timely “Silence Is Violence” stitched on yellow pleather, over a reflective green material. At the opening an enterprising artist with cell phone gave the willing a piece of yellow duct tape over the mouth, to ceremoniously rip off. C.C. Arshagra shot 17 people doing this de-gagging in the course of the two hour opening. 

In “Armed, Alarmed” in the East Gallery, Margaret Roleke installed a series of sculptures made from shotgun shells wired and zip tied in colorful configurations. How pretty those shells are, how lethal pretty really is! My favorite secret of this visual rhetoric was the story of the pink shells: why pink? Breast cancer solidarity of course. So lovely to be reminded that 2nd Amendment buffs want us to keep our breasts. Roleke lives near Sandy Hook, CT the site of a mass school shooting in 2012 and donates to gun control organizations.

Flag, Jacob Cullers

Jacob Cullers pulls no punches either with his peek-a–boo banners, a couple of which featured the yellow Gadsden Flag “Don’t Tread on Me.”  The flag, here installed as a layer with cutouts above imagery of protestors, these days evokes the grievances of white males who seem to feel their culture of violence is under attack. In another installation  called “Snake Pit” the Gadsden flag bunched in swags with zip ties, emerged from a stack of tractor trailer tires, ominously uncoiling with bits of the” don’t tread on me text” showing. The flag now beloved of libertarians, gun buffs and Proud Boys was carried at the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, obscuring its original meaning of resistance to imperial British control during the American Revolution.  

Snake Pit, Jacob Cullers

Using targets riddled with bullet holes from a police firearms training site, Jason Montgomery directly links extra-judicial police killing with the noxious American tradition of lynching. His jaunty decorated targets play off the bottle shape used to focus the shooter’s aim on the most vulnerable parts of the body.  All of these artists make the audience think about the deep and insidious hold that violence has on the American imagination – offering a critique that traces how actual violence is zip-tied to national mythologies about self-defense, gun rights and masculinity.

Hurt, Jason Montgomery