Games, Guns & Glory

These are power drawings. They are related to the power of man-made institutions. For some, this is a power to be emulated, for others, a power to be mistrusted, or even destroyed. To each their own.

I started housing my twisted drawings within the beautiful structures of our greatest architectural accomplishments to strike a balance between purpose and arbitrariness, between positive and negative, between black and white. That these buildings were constructed to buttress the religious or political ideas of particular communities provides a complex of meanings beyond any opinion of them I might have.

It was in the doing that I first noticed game elements. In the plan views, especially in the U.S. Capital plans, the drawings started to take on the appearance of game boards. The rounds of columns stood out in stark contrast to the rest of the compositional elements, stealing much of the focus and feeling, to me, like pieces from the traditional Asian chess-like game, known here as Go.

The word “Gun” is, in itself, enough to make us see them everywhere. A mere suggestion is all it takes to make them dominant and inescapable.