Limelight Firefight

Limelight Firefight is made of original and appropriated photographs and video about two worlds that reach children early: toy guns and fashion. I was interested in how early the conversation starts, and how much of it happens through things rather than words: a pink shoe, a plastic rifle, a costume, a pose rehearsed for a parent’s camera.

Family videos and snapshots shared on YouTube and Flickr record these moments, the unofficial “decisive moments” of a childhood, when a child tries on a role and is praised or corrected. Seen together, the objects and performances show a direction being given: toward being seen or toward fighting, toward being desired or toward acting out violence. The work does not judge the families or the children. It watches the steering.

The split is an old one, and it has long been questioned. John Berger criticized the habit, in painting and advertising, of showing men as the ones who act and women as the ones to be looked at; Laura Mulvey named that second position “to-be-looked-at-ness”; Judith Butler argued that gender is not something we have but something we repeat into being. Toys and home videos are where that repetition starts, before a child can choose it, and where two roles are offered as if they were the only ones.

Some of the photographs are of real paper targets, shot by kids raised with guns. I set them in the formal order of an Ellsworth Kelly: clean fields of color and hard edges carrying the marks of violence, held under control. Taken out of small hands and off the store shelf, the toys become artifacts of what a culture hopes its children will become.