Al Farrow: Wrath & Reverence

Al Farrow’s visually stunning, emotionally unsettling sculptures of religious architecture, ritual objects and reliquaries, meticulously crafted from deconstructed guns, bullets, glass and steel are at once seductive and confounding.  This is visual art that stimulates a cascade of thought and feeling, just as Al Farrow, a sculptor in all media for forty years, experienced on a trip to Italy fifteen years ago when he was confronted with a reliquary containing the remains of an ancient Saint.  He had seen a light that has since illuminated his unique exploration of religious history and violence, of luminous beauty and harsh truth, of peace, progress and brutality.

In the exhibition are churches, synagogues, mosques, a mausoleum, Jewish ritual objects and Christian ‘casket’ reliquaries, all rendered from munitions.  The buildings are highly detailed and faithful to reality in terms of proportion and architectural design.  One monumental sculpture, Bombed Mosque, took the artist a year to create in his California studio, using more than 50,000 disarmed bullets and shell casings.  The patterns and decorations formed from patinated and polished bullets adorn the structure in hauntingly accurate turquoise and gold; but one side of the massive dome is blown open, bombed in fact, speaking to the deep chasm between religious sects.

A Menorah, crafted from barbed wire and machine gun shells, is clearly layered with meaning and reference, but is an object of great reverence as well, attuned to past and present while statuesque and compelling in its presence.

The tall spire of a Protestant church, entitled Revelation, reaches for the heavens while the Spartan structure below contains a copy of Durer’s etching of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  Farrow makes art not about a certain religion, but about the repetition of history, the inexorable battle of mankind, and the perversion of organized religion as a whole.