Bay Area–based Al Farrow’s sculptures are strangely beautiful meditations on the relationship between religion and violence. Combining a draftsman’s precision with an understanding of metaphor, he makes art from spent ammunition and weapons. By fashioning these materials into religious symbols, he forces us to confront the role that religious extremism plays in instigating violence, and how war becomes its own religion, driven by the global arms trade in pursuit of profits. These harmonious assemblages of disturbing materials aim to provoke thought about the hypocrisy of violence exacted in the name of religion, and the irrational faith we place in instruments of destruction as a source of security.
- Installation Views
Al Farrow, Mosque III (After National Mosque of Nigeria, Abuja), 2010; “tank-killer” missiles, bullets, brass, steel, and trigger; courtesy the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; © Al Farrow; photo: Robert Divers Herrick
Al Farrow, Revelation I, 2009; bullets, guns, steel, polycarbonate, steel shot, and Bible, with facsimile of Dürer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; courtesy the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; © Al Farrow; photo: Robert Divers Herrick
Al Farrow, Revelation I, 2009; bullets, guns, steel, polycarbonate, steel shot, and Bible, with facsimile of Dürer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; courtesy the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; © Al Farrow; photo: Robert Divers Herrick
Al Farrow, Mosque III (After National Mosque of Nigeria, Abuja), 2010; “tank-killer” missiles, bullets, brass, steel, and trigger; courtesy the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; © Al Farrow; photo: Robert Divers Herrick
Al Farrow’s sculptures address the intersection of religion and violence with an arresting conflation of imagery and medium — often including spent ammunition. Originally from Brooklyn, he has lived in the Bay Area for more than 30 years and is represented in the collections of the San Jose Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the de Young Museum, which organized a solo exhibition of his work in 2008.