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Pop Song
2020 - Sculpture/Installation - 12" by 12" by 6"
Pop Song is an installation formed as a macabre instrument - a grim visualization of the ubiquity of gun violence in American culture. Utilizing data parsed from The Gun Violence archive (gunviolencearchive.org), Pop Song tracks incidents of gun violence across the United States in near real-time, compressing toy gun caps for each death or injury (on the left or right solenoid, respectively.) At the time of writing this, there have been 245 gun violence related injuries in the past 72 hours, and 107 deaths nationally. As Pop Song compresses its levers on the caps to alert of these incidents, the noise is sharp and startling, arriving in random intervals throughout the day. One must choose to either desensitize to its constant clangor, or examine and confront the implications of the popping sounds. Gesturing toward automated devices such as the player piano and the stock ticker, Pop Song serves as spotlight on both our resigned acceptance of violence's ubiquity and our rote disassociation in the face of horror's constant crushing song. As we reimagine democracy and indeed, our world, in a post-Covid context, Pop Song reminds of another unresolved and tragic crisis playing out hour by hour, day by day.
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