Bullet points
Arlington arts center, Sept.-Dec. 2020
Bullet Points is the result of re-examining my relationship with hunting through probing my childhood memories of this culture. To reduce the conversation to good or bad is simplistic and I’m interested in what lies in between. I took a closer look at some of the complexities of deer hunting: ritual, tradition, community, identity, necessity, sport, power, desensitization, gender roles, sexualization, fetishization. My curiosity about this complex connection I have with life and death grew into an interest in the simultaneous seduction and repulsion I feel towards the graphic nature of the process.
Some of my earliest childhood memories are the blood streaked floor in one of the structures on our farm dubbed “The Deer Shed.” Here, deer carcasses are brought to be skinned and processed post-hunt. The men would laugh and drink Busch while I made a game of tracing the crimson gestures with my boot. Shouldn’t I have been traumatized by all of this? Was I groomed from an early age to form this disconnect or was it more innocent...the familiarity of death, a respect for the need to feed oneself and family. How much is nature and how much is nurture?
As the drop cloths age the blood darkens to brown.
Blood pool carpet, TV from Grandpa’s basement, cast bronze sausages, a framed photo of the only live deer in the show (taken by Nicole Shaver), taxidermy deer bust of the one and only deer my mother has ever shot during the one time she went hunting, cast bronze antlers, buckeye nut, tiger’s eye crystals, and polyurethane.
My father had it mounted for my mother and it hung in our house through my childhood. Last year I found it tossed in my parent’s garage, dusty and missing its eyes. Mom “didn’t give a shit” if I took it, so I cast the antlers in bronze with polished tips, gave it a buckeye nut 🌰 for one eye and an amber-oozing crystal cluster of tiger’s eye for the other.
