Kadie Salfi, Ithica, NY based artist with Every 16 Hours: Pretty Fucking Awful & Gemini, (2018), Lip gloss, nail polish, graphite, varnish on plywood, 35.5 x 20.5 inches in “Deadlocked and Loaded”. Pretty Fucking Awful—Yesterday, yet another horrible shooting, misogynistic and yet more violence to women, minimized because there is a possibility they worked in a massage parlor that may have been more than just massages. I’m so angry, I’m grinding my teeth and seeing red. From the Independent.uk “Robert Aaron Long, the 21-year-old man who allegedly shot and killed eight people at an Atlanta area massage parlors apparently was a frequent visitor to the establishments prior to his spree, and told police he went on his rampage because it had been “a really bad day” and that his shooting – which left eight dead and one injured – was a result of him being “at the end of his rope” and “fed up.”
Well, quite frankly those eight souls are having a “really bad day” and I’m completely at the end of my rope and fed up! The lack of sensitivity by the police is just astounding. It harkens back to asking what a woman was wearing when she was sexually assaulted, as if that can explain it away and cast the blame again from the male perpetrator. So incredibly tone deaf.
Kadie Salfi has created an incredible series titled “Every 16 Hours” and we have three works at ArtRage Gallery. They are beautiful, whimsical, intensely colored images that then are shocking with the text and the stories they portray: this gun killed our child, this gun was used to a kill a mother, and with this work “pretty fucking awful”. Kadie researched and spent years on this series, they are powerful and poignant.
Salfi says, “Every 16 Hours, created in 2018, is a collection of 16 paintings that put the American gun culture in the crosshairs. It is an extensive arsenal of handguns, each painted on plywood panels with lustrous splashes of over-the-counter beauty products—lipstick, nail polish, blush—and captioned with an unsettling statement of provenance or prophecy: to kill his wife or to kill your daughter.”
As a young artist growing up in rural New England, Salfi was fascinated by guns: their power, their stark beauty, their omnipresence in popular media and everyday life. Guns figured frequently in her early forays into artmaking, appearing in etchings, screen prints, and Polaroids. However, when she first heard the statistic that every 16 hours in America, a woman is shot and killed by a current or former lover, a new element of terror entered her work focused on guns—terror commingled with allure.
Using a Pop palette, Salfi has been focused on the subject of gun violence in America since 2012, presenting social and political commentary with a sly stylishness that calls for the viewer to adjust perspective both literally and emotionally. Salfi has painted many guns used in mass school shootings, guns used to kill black men and now guns used to kill women. From a distance, the guns in Every 16 Hours are sexy, blingy, and pop off the camouflage grain of the plywood, pulling the viewer in only to discover via the text what the gun was used for, to kill a woman, your daughter, her friend, my mom. By personalizing the statements, Salfi asks the viewer if this is okay, acceptable or not. There is no blame, only the facts.
Learn more at kadiesalfi.com and @kadiesalfi
