Shooting Targets - 2019

Some of the artworks were featured in a group exhibition at NEIU in 2022. Some were published in Protean Magazine, summer 2021.

The shooting targets I am referencing in these artworks came from the first time I went to an indoor shooting range in Los Angeles in February 2019. What I was expecting to be a recreational activity soon felt very intense and not fun. The process of firing a gun repeatedly into a target shaped like a human labeled with organs made me very uncomfortable. I am usually a competitive person and like to score highly, but very soon I did not care to be good at this. My body was sweating and shaking as I was thinking about the fact that this is how so many people kill and die every single day. I did not like how the layout of the indoor shooting range reminded me of lanes at a bowling alley. The memory of a bowling ball bouncing over into the wrong lane kept playing over and over in my mind’s eye.

It was strange to me how easy it was to gain access to these weapons and ammo in order to practice shooting. All you need is a little money and a valid driver’s license. The process was smooth and efficient. We didn’t have to wait very long. During the process of choosing which guns to rent, I was made to feel as if I was already supposed to know about the weapons. I was with a friend who ended up choosing for us. There were a variety of paper targets to purchase for 10 cents each. Some had cartoonish zombies on them, some had a figure holding a gun pointed back at you, some just had concentric circles. The person in the lane next to us had chosen a target with an image of a big man holding a knife up to the throat of a little girl.

I chose the basic pink target and my friend chose the black one that you will see in these paintings. We rented a glock and a revolver. I preferred the revolver because of it’s old-fashioned design, how the round chamber only fits 6 bullets at a time. You have to be careful about the way you hold a revolver because it releases a small puff of hot smoke out of the side of the gun when you fire it and it can burn your hand if you are not careful.

For these artworks, I begin by placing the actual shooting target over my drawing paper, and I trace the bullet holes so that they are exactly in the same place as the actual target. I use those markings as a guide to paint the figure. At first I painted each of them in one session (above). Later on when I returned to this series in 2020-21 I began working back into them, inserting internal organs into the works (below).