Gun c. 1938

Curator: What an image. Samuel Faigin rendered this rifle in graphite and charcoal, around 1938. It is a powerful subject rendered in surprisingly soft, even elegant, strokes. What’s your initial read? Editor: It’s surprisingly bloodless. Given the subject matter, I would expect tension, or a sense of implied violence. But it’s almost…domesticated? It has the same gentle feel as a study of furniture. The craftsmanship on the wooden stock even comes through, that small decorative emblem, like a tiny coat of arms. Curator: Indeed! Let’s talk about the process. Look at the details in the graphite lines, the careful layering of the charcoal to suggest texture, like the wood grain. Consider also the labor to make and maintain such an object. Was this an implement of sport, hunting, self-defense, or perhaps even state-sponsored coercion? Each possibility reflects radically different industrial processes. Editor: Yes, that insignia intrigues me. It’s so subtle, easy to overlook. To me, that implies a kind of heraldic authority, or an invocation of established hierarchies, even in the face of democratized gun ownership. The rifle is an icon of power, no matter how prettily Faigin has rendered it here. Think of all the loaded, contradictory symbols that Europeans brought with them when they landed in this part of the world, guns of this type chief among them. Curator: I wonder if the neutrality of the palette reflects that historical removal you are speaking of. We see how Faigin’s medium abstracts what has always been an instrument with tremendous social implications, good or ill. What happens to this violence once it becomes this thing, so finely rendered on paper? The drawing material itself, graphite, for example, becomes the literal trace of a hand…but one operating as a free agent within an even greater marketplace of exchanged imagery. Editor: And, by the time this drawing was made, guns were less associated with personal liberty than with industrial war. A potent reminder that objects become charged with so much meaning, consciously and unconsciously. I wonder what Faigin felt as he sketched this gun and considered his world then on the cusp of unimaginable carnage. Curator: Fascinating observations that remind us the act of creation doesn't happen in a vacuum, it echoes with our hopes, fears, and history. Editor: Right, images speak volumes even when apparently quiet.