- The Stranger
- WARNING Spencer Moody at Solo Bar.
It’s the Fourth of July, and I really should be used to the sound of fireworks by now. But this year, every time I hear that familiar series of loud bangs, my mind turns to gunshots.
In the past few weeks, Seattle has been consumed by gunfire. My dad now turns on the 11 o’clock news with a new feverish devotion, eager to hear details of the day’s shootings, morbid curiosity and the increasingly blasé attitude of the newscasters gluing him to the television. Murders and gun control have replaced the always-dependable weather as the lazy Seattleite’s conversation starter—and Spencer Moody, singer for the Murder City Devils, has an exhibition that takes advantage of this looming obsession, this paranoia in the local consciousness.
Free Guns for the Cops is a series of silkscreen prints on rough watercolor paper, each depicting a gun with the barrel pointing back at the shooter. They are raw, blotchy, and purposeful, and the colors are simple but dramatic, most in saturated red and black. The geometric designs don’t glorify each detail of the machine like taxonomically-driven gun art, but instead spark the most basic recognition of patterns, forcing our brains to scream “GUN!”
In this way, the series speaks to the iconography of guns and the concepts they conjure, relying on our preconceived notions and associations to fill in the details he leaves out. Across prints, the guns’ grips stay mostly identical, drawing attention to Moody’s creative representations of the barrels that twist around to aim back at whoever pulls the trigger.
Moody describes the series as dealing with “the nature of violence and who’s involved.” It overtly comments on the use of violence by police, which is damn topical: Last week, the SPD came under scrutiny for pepper-spraying Pride revelers. The SPD has been questioned again and again for its use of excessive force—it’s under investigation by the DOJ. Remember the time last year when a picture was taken of a completely unattended semi-automatic rifle just chilling on the hood of a police car outside the Roosevelt Hotel?
While the SPD obviously needs to rethink its use of force and to avoid leaving a semi-automatic weapon sitting on a street corner like a smelly abandoned couch, the question of “who’s involved” in violent encounters becomes more interesting when it’s not limited to authority figures. Moody’s prints ultimately communicate a broader ideal of personal responsibility for weapons and their consequences.
These prints do not contain characters, allowing the viewer to imagine whoever they like reaching for the booby-trapped trigger. The question presented is about the shooter: simultaneous antagonist and victim. The lack of human figures creates a void, and the crowded venue (Solo Bar on Lower Queen Anne) fills it. Everyone is involuntarily drawn into this gun-obsessed Seattle moment; the show is incorporated into the atmosphere of the bar the same way the drama of the moment is integrated in our culture and conversation. The instinct that makes me assume gunshots instead of fireworks is the same one that makes me suspicious, scanning the bar, trying to pick out who would be most likely to pull a revolver from their pocket.
This post has been updated since its original publication.