Best News Network

Melting guns and bullet casings, this artist turns weapons into bells

Name Against the Same is part of Stephanie Mercedes’ A Sky of Shattered Glass Reflected by the Sun exhibition at Culture House in Washington, D.C.

Stephanie Mercedes


hide caption

toggle caption

Stephanie Mercedes


Name Against the Same is part of Stephanie Mercedes’ A Sky of Shattered Glass Reflected by the Sun exhibition at Culture House in Washington, D.C.

Stephanie Mercedes

Inside an art gallery in southwest Washington, D.C., artist Stephanie Mercedes is surrounded by bells, many of them cast from bullet casings and parts of old guns.

“I melt down weapons and transform them into musical installations and musical instruments,” she explains.

YouTube

Bells captivate Mercedes as a medium, she says, because they carry spiritual significance across cultures. Their sound purifies space. At a time when mass shootings regularly rock the country, bells are also tools of mourning. The death knells of her instruments first memorialized the victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla. It was that tragedy that inspired this project.

“Because I’m gay, I’m Latina, and I easily could have been there,” she says. But Mercedes points out that most of us could be anywhere a mass shooting happens — a grocery store, a concert hall, a workplace, a school. Part of her work involves recording the sounds of weapons melting in her furnace and composing the audio into soundscapes for her shows, including the one where we talked, called A Sky of Shattered Glass Reflected by the Shining Sun at Culture House.

“Guns are normally a combination of galvanized steel and aluminum,” she says. “So I have to cut those down and melt them at different temperatures or through different casting processes.”

Sonic Fracture

Stephanie Mercedes


hide caption

toggle caption

Stephanie Mercedes

“As casters, we wear these big leather aprons, because molten metal is very dangerous for your body. But there’s something very meditative about that process because, in that moment, you’re holding this strange, transformed, liquid metal, and you only have a few seconds to pour it into a shape it truly wants to become. “

Many of Mercedes’ bells are not beautiful. Some look like the weapons they used to be. Others are small, twisted bells that look like primitive relics, from a ruined civilization. Primitive relics, the artist says, are something she hopes all guns will one day be.

Edited by: Ciera Crawford
Audio story produced by:
Isabella Gomez Sarmiento
Audio story edited by:
Ciera Crawford
Visual Production by:
Beth Novey

Stay connected with us on social media platform for instant update click here to join our  Twitter, & Facebook

We are now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@TechiUpdate) and stay updated with the latest Technology headlines.

For all the latest Entertainment News Click Here 

 For the latest news and updates, follow us on Google News

Read original article here

Denial of responsibility! NewsAzi is an automatic aggregator around the global media. All the content are available free on Internet. We have just arranged it in one platform for educational purpose only. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to publish your materials on our website, please contact us by email – [email protected]. The content will be deleted within 24 hours.