D.C. artist Stephanie Mercedes’ creative response to gun violence
By hola | Published | No Comments
Mass shootings are in the news so much these days, and so are the angry public debates over whether the country needs stricter gun control laws, but D.C. artist Stephanie Mercedes has come up with a novel way to voice her concern.
Mercedes melts down weapons to create musical sounds and sculptures. It’s an elegant solution, considering that it also allows her to make art that incorporates her “first love,” music.
But those pieces are just one-half of what she calls the “doble filo,” or two-sided blade, that characterizes her artwork and her life. Though the queer Latinx interdisciplinary artist was born in the District of Columbia, she says she’s also been profoundly influenced by her family’s Argentinian history and the trauma of the country’s “Dirty War” in the 1970s and 1980s, when its ruling military junta disappeared as many as an estimated 30,000 people. She believes she has “no other option” than basing her work around social issues because she says that’s just who she is.
When it comes to her work sparked by mass shootings, there is, unfortunately, a steady flow of breaking news. In September 2023, there were reports of more than 490 mass shootings in the United States, according to The Gun Violence Archive. In 2022, the non-profit group reported 647 mass shootings.
Mercedes takes inspiration from those shootings and creates bodies of work that reflect on the tragedies caused by such violence. Having graduated from art school in Argentina before returning to D.C. to pursue her career, Mercedes has a unique perspective on art and her one-of-a-kind method of creating pieces that send out important political messages. Her attention-grabbing perspective and unabashed way of speaking on social issues attract people to her work.
Read more to learn about how Mercedes came to this method of deconstruction and what else she’s capable of.
How have you been able to combine your passion for music with the political aspect of making art?
What I’ve been doing recently is taking my process of melting down weapons and transforming them into sculptures and musical instruments. I have begun to compose music in reaction to that.
I have a piece where the bass sound is the sound of me throwing bullet casings into my furnace to be destroyed. Then I begin to compose music in reaction to those sounds. I’m actually going to be producing a gun transformation opera called “Never in Our Image.” I’ll be doing the same sound process but with guns and then composing music. Act One will be a gun-cutting ceremony. We’ll compose music in relation to the sounds of guns being destroyed. It will be a very radical opera, but to me, it’s very important.
My stepmother was a Latin American art historian, so I focused on revisionist histories very early from a visual art standpoint. But recently, I’ve been trying to decolonize my relationship to sound a little bit more.
You said you’re about to orchestrate an opera. Besides that, are there any art pieces you’re thinking of creating?
Yes. I’m creating an enormous sculpture. It’s going to be 25 feet by 15 feet. I’m creating the whole thing out of thin pieces of steel, which I have welded together and bent so it looks like this huge creature. Then I’m going to attach all of these motors and musical instruments, which will be cast out of guns and bullets. Everything will start to move and make a sound onto itself.
It’s going to be at the University of Maryland Art Gallery. I am really lucky because my studio is in the same building. I can make something really huge. I just have to be able to push it into the elevator. It’s a new body of work. I’m trying to explore ideas of queer vulnerability in relation to these kinds of transformed languages and systems of oppression.
How did you make the decision to integrate weapons and bullets into your artwork?
It was definitely the Orlando Pulse Night Club shooting. I think that being any type of “other” in this country is really hard. It means that you walk every day with a little bit more fear. If people are able to express that hatred [towards you] in a much faster way, it just makes your fear more elevated. For some reason, that shooting was like a precipice for me. It was a moment when I realized how vulnerable we all really are. I really wanted to reclaim that material. So I took a Sig Sauer MCX semi-automatic rifle — the same model of rifle that was used by the shooter — and melted it down, transforming it into 49 liberty bells for each of the individuals who lost their lives that night.
Why did you decide to focus on social issues as a source of inspiration?
I truly feel like because of who I am, I have no other option. I gave my students an assignment. They had to write down 50 different reasons why they make the work they do. For me, if I had to answer that question, [the answer would be] because I have no other option.
If your life has been impacted by certain things, then you feel compelled to react to those things and try to reflect on them. As someone who is both queer and Latina, that’s the basis of who I am.
It’s very funny because I have, kind of, these two bodies of work; one is a little bit more U.S.-centric while the other is more centered around Latin America, but in a way, that’s who I am as a person as well.
Have you faced any obstacles, whether physical or emotional, when choosing your sources of inspiration and which issues to focus on? For example, I really like the backstory behind your piece “The Last Song.”
The first obstacle you always face as an artist is emotional because you are trying to tackle issues that make you feel really vulnerable. Sometimes my collaborators also feel vulnerable. But as an artist, that is such a source of power. If we can take the tools, words or movements that have been used against us and reclaim them as our own, then maybe that is transforming oppression into emancipation.
On top of that, the other obstacle that’s very common is physical limitation. A lot of my work is trying to understand how to take these objects of violence and try to deconstruct and transform them. The very first weapon I melted down, I had no idea how to do it. I really didn’t know what I was doing. It was really hard for me, but it was this physical limitation that I’m constantly trying to get over. I feel like that has [now] become part of my work.
Who is your target audience and why?
It really varies. I feel like people can view my work from so many different angles. It’s important to me that the queer community is part of my work, you know, the people who maybe are also afraid to go to queer nightclubs.
I started making this work because of the Orlando Pulse Night Club shooting, which was a horrific shooting that happened in a queer Latinx nightclub. How many times have I been in spaces that were so similar, and I felt safe? So I constantly hope to react to [these tragedies], but at the same time, I like to make work for anyone who has lost their loved ones to gun violence or felt the ripple effects of gun violence.
Then there are some of my other installations, like a sculpture I made last summer that was called “En Sonido,” a sound loop. It’s an interactive installation where people can kind of activate these sound loops. It’s thinking about the history of the Desaparecidos (the disappeared ones). If you’re someone who has no idea about the history and you’re from the United States, you’ll have a very different experience with the installation than if you have a personal connection. It will exist as a doble filo (double-edge).
How do you want your work to impact those who interact with it?
I really want people to feel something. I hope that people have an experience of beauty, but then realize that maybe there’s a level of violence in the work. Ultimately, I just want people to feel emotions — to have a cathartic experience where they’re allowing themselves to grieve, knowing it’s okay to grieve and to let go of that grief because, in our society, there are not a lot of ways to grieve. So I hope that my work can create a safe space for mourning to occur.
Is there a specific message you want your art to put out into the world? And if there is, why?
I make my work from a very personal perspective, about my own story and my family’s story. But I also can’t control what the viewer sees and how they experience the work. Sometimes, people will experience something in a different way than I was intending. People [will naturally] bring their own life experiences and culture to my work. So I try to stay open to it, but, ultimately, what I really want to think about is how can I think about the ways in which rituals of mourning can be transformed into activism.
Act III of Mercedes’ gun transformation opera, “Never in Our Image,” will be performed on September 15, 16, 21, 22 and 23. View Mercedes’ works on her website and Instagram page.
*This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
– Interview by Estrellita Soto Flores and Flavia Olivera
– Story by Estrellita Soto Flores
– Edited by Michelle Benitez, Amelia Woolley-Larrea, Piper Russell, Yaretzi Chavez, and Jordan Luz
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