Nina L DeFelice

GUN SHOW

Noun. (US) An event where a promoter rents a venue to bring together gun dealers and potential purchasers.

Dictionary.com

Noun. The showing off of one’s biceps

Billy: Have you got your tickets yet? 

Sarah: To What? 

Billy: To the Gun Show!!! ***while pulling back his right sleeve, flexing his muscles, and pointing with his left hand

Urbandictionary.com

GUN SHOW is an ongoing series of works which began in 2018 that explores the widespread obsessive gun culture permeating everyday life in the United States. Through verbal and body language and the use of imagery, Americans routinely, whether consciously or not, make references to firearms. The series consists of oil paintings of toy guns and portraits of People re-enacting the subtle firearm references ingrained in the way we live our lives.

GUN SHOW is meant to examine the depth of influence of guns in our culture and imagines how references to gun culture might even fall into obscurity if firearms were to one day become less prevalent in American society.

The secondhand toy guns included in this series, as well as the found photographs from which the oil paintings draw inspiration, were collected primarily outside of the US, which aims to signify how obsession with guns amounts to a significant US cultural export, influencing society even far outside of the boundaries of the United States. The imagery from the photographs has been manipulated by the artist to incorporate references to gun culture, exploring the subtle degree to which these references remain acutely ordinary before becoming glaring. As a US American citizen the artist is grappling with the many ways which guns are a core part of the American experience.

In My Belly is a series which began as a practice to archive the vessels in our home but morphed into a study on motherhood following the birth of my daughter. Through the imagery of vessels and text, I explore the different ways in which motherhood transforms a person into a vessel both physically for a time then psychologically.

We become vessels for our children to process their emotions and we control our emotions as if vessels keeping in liquid from spilling out.

This series has been on display together with a collective of fellow parent artists, the first exhibition took place in 2025 and was titled “Einsame Eltern” and we will be revisiting the topics of parenthood in 2026 with an exhibition called “Parenting Climate”.

Mask is a series which explores how much of a face must be missing for a person to become unrecognisable.

Carving Swan is the series I completed for my BFA at The Corcoran School of Art at George Washington University in 2012.