Memories Misused
Real Art Ways
Hartford
Oct. 15, 2024
Photographer Peter Brown has transformed a harrowing experience into a mind-bending display of resilience and recovery with Memories Misused at Real Art Ways.
Brown was the victim of an armed home invasion in 2013. His work tries to express his experience with post traumatic stress disorder in real world terms using what he refers to as “mundane subject matter”.
Guns feature prominently in Brown’s work, mostly as a result of guns being used against him during the home invasion. Yet guns are also the prime symbol of American violence, going back to the days of the cowboy and his revolver to the semiautomatic weapons that tear children apart in our schools.
A gun is a terrifying object. Its only purpose is to inflict grave injury or death. So seeing it juxtaposed against a teddy bear in Disguise_TeddySmilesColt38Special drives home the hell that we’ve allowed ourselves to fall into. The teddy bear’s smile is the perfect visual representation of the way we raise our children in a society soaked with guns. There are consequences for those choices.Guns are the leading cause of death for children and teens, which is such an insane statistic that I almost couldn’t believe it. Almost.
Victimhood is a difficult topic to discuss. Although I haven’t experienced anything as unnerving as having my home invaded, I’ve been assaulted and robbed twice on the street. It took years for the sense of fear to fade when I was walking down the street, and I still watch everyone around me closely, even more than a decade afterwards. There are endless hours of blame and guilt, thinking about all of the things you could have done differently to avoid that situation in the first place.
But the worst feeling of all is the sense of shame. At your own weakness. At feeling afraid. At not instantly becoming John Wick when the moment arises. As it turns out, when you get jumped on the street, or have a gun pointed at you, there’s not much you can do but survive.
Caution feels like the image that captures all of those emotions most effectively to me. The doll looks like he’s simply trying to go about his business, but everything about his life has been warped by the experience of violence. Everything looks different, even the person who has experienced violence. The peaceful world has been shattered and fractalized, and the sense of security that a person felt can never be reassembled
This was a difficult exhibit to look at, not just because it reminded me of my own history with violence. It was a sad visual metaphor for the horrors that we’re all forced to live with every day. The threat of violence is something that we all have to live with, but that’s compounded by the fact that there are over 300 million guns floating around in the United States, and one of them could be pointed at us when we least expect it.
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Memories Misused is at Real Art Ways through Nov. 17.
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