SAN FRANCISCO — In an unassuming back room in the Catherine Clark Gallery in the Potrero Hill neighborhood, among stored canvases, sits a 2,000-pound replica of the White House. Step closer, and you’ll notice the unmistakable cylindrical form of a bullet, and then of many, many bullets.
The rust-colored replica, over six feet wide, was made in 2018 from repurposed bullets, gun parts, shell casings, and glass by sculptor Al Farrow, based in San Rafael, a town about 20 minutes north of San Francisco. “White House” is priced at $500,000 and is on view indefinitely at the Catherine Clark Gallery, years after its creation and museum tour, reappearing to the public in time for the Fall of Freedom series of nationwide art and protest actions this weekend. The artist spoke at the gallery on Friday, November 21, during a special viewing, one of hundreds of cultural events across the country opposing authoritarianism.
In a phone interview with Hyperallergic, Farrow said he felt the work took on a renewed significance under the second Trump administration.
“Trump got elected and I just said, ‘Look, I think the White House is more relevant now than when I made it, and it’s more relevant than anything else I have to show,’” Farrow recalled of his conversation with his gallerist when they decided to display the work again.
Farrow said the idea first occurred to him during George W. Bush’s presidency, but when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he stopped planning the work, citing a feeling of hope. Nearly a decade later, when Trump was elected in 2016, he picked it back up.
The recreation of the White House marks a thematic departure from many of Farrow’s other sculptures, which include models of synagogues, mosques, and Christian churches comprised of munitions.
In these religious architectural renderings, Farrow critiques a hypocritical connection between religion and violence. Farrow, who comes from a Jewish background and describes himself as an atheist, has been critical of Israel’s violence against Palestinians in Gaza and has included Uzi guns, a weapon once used by the Israeli military, in his works. His cathedral sculpture “The Spine and Tooth of Santo Guerro” (2008), titled after a fictional saint, is also comprised of gun parts and bullets and resides in the collection of San Francisco’s de Young Museum.
In the 2000s, though, Farrow wanted to move away from religious iconography. Farrow said “White House” was one of his original secular concepts, and also the largest sculpture he’s made since he got his start in the 1970s.
Rather than scaling the work based on the White House, Farrow based the dimensions of his presidential residence on the barrels of machine guns, 18 of which he used to create columns.
“I am not a shooter. I don’t own guns. I don’t shoot for hobby or hunt or and I was never in the military. I’ve always been the social commentary artist,” Farrow said of his relationship to his medium of choice. Under Trump’s second presidency, restrictions on who can buy a gun, including those who have active arrest warrants, have eased.
His first works featuring gun parts were inspired by Catholic reliquaries, containers for relics that were sometimes fashioned into the form of body parts to store remains of saints during the Middle Ages.
From 1999 until earlier this year, it was illegal to purchase more than one firearm a month in California, per state law, but that prohibition was struck down in June of this year after a challenge from a pro-gun organization. When asked how he procured gun parts on a large scale, Farrow said he obtained them “a variety of ways,” and left it there.
Originally, his model of the White House was painted black, but Farrow decided to chemically rust the model to make it appear “corroded.”
“And that rust, for me, is symbolic of the corrosion, the degeneration of the presidency in our system,” Farrow said.
Farrow, who is in his mid-80s, said he has never seen this level of fear of artistic censorship in his decades-long career.
“This is above and beyond anything that’s come before. We’re really facing a steep decline,” Farrow said. “I’m really thinking that it might be a really long time until things get back to good.”
Farrow still spends six days a week working on his art, but has shifted his focus away from architecture. He finished a sculpture of a violin this week, based on Violins of Hope, a musical project that collects instruments owned by Jewish people before and during World War II. Farrow’s version comprises four handguns, and the neck of the instrument is a double-barreled shotgun in a critique comparing Israel’s actions in Gaza with the Holocaust.
“I’m very aware that I don’t have that many years left,” Farrow said. “I’m just allowing myself total freedom to make anything that I’m looking at. My piles and piles of guns and gun parts and stuff.”
