Steven Spazuk: Flowers, Triggers of Peace
November 2, 2018 - January 27, 2019
On November 2nd, guests of the opening reception for “Flowers, Triggers of Peace” Lent a hand to create a symbolic collaborative artwork for PEACE. During this event, the 168 acts of gun violence that led to injuries and deaths in Boston between January 1st and October 1st, 2018 were symbolically erased. Visitors were invited to run their bare peace fingers on an original large fumage painting of an immense handgun composed of a soot mosaic of 168 smaller guns. These represented the tragic reality of the 135 injuries and 33 deaths from firearms since the beginning of the year.* Participants then transferred the soot collected on their fingers to a second canvas to create a beautiful flower, one petal at a time; each contribution building the collective message:
“FLOWERS, TRIGGERS of PEACE!”
*The Gun Violence Archive is an online archive of gun violence incidents collected from over 2,500 media, law enforcement, government, and commercial sources daily in an effort to provide near-real-time data about the results of gun violence. GVA in an independent data collection and research group with no affiliation with any advocacy organization.
