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.
As presented in Forum Gallery’s 2015 solo exhibition for the Artist, Farrow’s churches, synagogues, mosques, mausoleums, Jewish ritual objects and Christian ‘casket’ reliquaries, are 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 Dürer’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. Sacred and profane, metaphoric and literal, gleaming and shocking, Al Farrow’s art is unforgettable and deeply moving.
Al Farrow’s work was the subject of a 2008 solo exhibition at the San Francisco Fine Arts Museum (the de Young) in California. His sculptures are in public collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, 21C Museum Foundation (Louisville, Kentucky); and the Government of the State of Israel. Forum Gallery’s 2015 solo exhibition, Al Farrow: Wrath and Reverence, was accompanied by a 112-page catalogue with essays by Eleanor Heartney and Diana L. Daniels, along with a foreword by Chris Hedges. It traveled to the Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, CA), 21C Museum (Louisville, KY), Bellevue Arts Museum (Bellevue, WA); University of Wyoming Art Museum (Laramie, WY), Museum of Craft and Design (San Francisco, CA), and Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco, CA).