As a teacher and a mother, the most recent bouts of gun violence in schools has impacted both my work life and art life. I grew up with guns in rural Eastern Oregon, and this informs my perception of guns as both a tool, a cultural identifier, and a danger to our society.
Being a direct contact to children processing the “normalization” of school shootings and gun violence the last 12 years, I am deeply disturbed by our society’s inability to prioritize children’s safety in our policies and laws.
This mixed media work attempts to call on the nostalgia of a time where “we” believed our children were safer and America was “greater”. I used these vintage frames, the history of silhouettes and the female dominated symbols of democracy; liberty, justice and peace with imagery of children and targets.
These contradictions not only symbolize societies acceptance of our culture of violence and its victims but have helped me continue to process my personal divides of understanding our history with guns, feeling powerlessness, being a mother of children who wonder and seeing children suffer as a results of adult choices