Rylan Broadbent
Playing With Guns
Headbones Gallery
January 25-March 15, 2025
Exhibition Catalogue
UP NEXText
Paintings by
Janine Hall
Headbones Gallery
March 22 - May 3, 2025
LINKS
Island Mountain Arts
Arts Wells
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PLAYING WITH GUNS
Featuring
RYLAN BROADBENT
January
25 -
March 15, 2025
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It’s a subject that raises
eyebrows the moment it’s broached – Guns. A highly
divisive symbol, a gun is a nudge towards fear, a
barrier to intrusion or a means to a meal. Rylan
Broadbent has taken ‘the gun’ on and in Playing With
Guns presents new layers of significance and even though
he has peeled the onion with eyes wide open, his vision
has not been blurred by tears. But he has left his
fingerprints.
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By re-evaluating the form – passing it
through the filter of art - the function all but
disappears and from this loaded barrel comes another
message. It is not, however, a soft challenge like a
cartoon POP from a toy gun; resilience shoots from the
hard core of a determined aesthetic.
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Broadbent has
fashioned mandalas from guns. These pieces, beautifully
constructed, read first as delicate, lovely, embodying
notions of peace and harmony, balance and equilibrium,
meditation and focus – passive messages. The mind sees
not the individual symbol but an entirety made up of
design components that work communally to create a
whole. As recognition sets in, the hard metal, abrupt
edges, steely tones and immutable firmness of a physical
gun, which Broadbent has convinced us as existing solely
as a means to unity, registers.
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Using children’s wax
crayons as material and bullet casings as molds, he has
cast hundreds of beautiful bullets that could also be
used as crayons again.
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This is what transpires when
an artist plays with guns. There is nothing ‘bad boy’
about these works. Broadbent has been smart; he has left
the safety on.
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