JOERAEL ELLIOTT
Clip of Petals
Joerael Elliott’s latest show at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, titled A Clip of Petals, is a fully immersive experience. On view through August 5, the exhibition serves as a visual dialogue around gun violence and mass shootings in the United States. Elliott describes, “I wanted to create something that is both intriguing and beautiful.”
Upon walking into the exhibition space, viewers see a watercolorized mural in sumi style, which depicts a flower made of assault rifles. “In the middle of the flower, where insects typically find pollen, there is a clip of bullets, with a bee trying to extract them,” Elliott says. The mural is also decorated with the Sanskrit words for “non-violence” and “non-stealing,” along with words in his own made-up script, which he calls “handskrit”—a mix of Sanskrit and graffiti-style letters.
Further inside is a row of 12 small, double-sided panels. On the front are flowers, a little exploded, representing lives taken by gun violence and the overall fragility of nature. Laser-etched on the back of each panel is the date and loca-
tion of a different mass shooting, along with the type of gun used, calling out the perpetrators of the violence.
Though the subject of gun ownership and gun violence is a touchy one, Elliott says he doesn’t intend for the work to be divisive. “I’m not trying to say, ‘people need to have their guns taken away,’” he says. “I want to have a more nuanced conversation about what gun ownership means in the face of mass shootings and unarmed African-Americans getting shot by police officers.”
He hopes to one day bring a larger scale, public version of the exhibition to other locations, particularly his home state of Texas, where gun ownership is the norm.
Shastyn Blomquist, assistant curator and exhibitions coordinator at the Center for Contemporary Arts, says A Clip of Petals “is immediately confronting, making a powerful statement about gun culture in America…The effect is arresting.”
Center for Contemporary Arts
1050 Old Pecos Trail • Santa Fe, NM 87505 (505) 982-1338 • www.ccasantafe.org