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Gun Show
Rethinking Weapons in the Name of Art 
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After assembling mock assault rifles out of everyday found objects, sculptor David Hess decides to turn them into an experimental public art installation to explore America’s obsession with guns. The fruits of that mission comprise the story of Gun Show, a fascinating and deeply moving documentary that steers clear of advocating a position and instead invites meaningful dialogue about the cultural power of guns. Beginning in Hess’s sculpture studio, and culminating on the mall of the nation’s capital, filmmaker Richard Chisolm’s three-year documentary “road movie” represents a continual quest for meaning: an invitation to freshly engage the very loaded topic of guns in America. Gun Show is a powerful educational resource for inspiring critical thinking and discussion on a range of topics, including cultural mythology and symbolism, civic discourse, public art, public policy, gun rights, gun safety, and violence in America.
ISBN: 978-1-893521-04-9 Run time: 30 min
Date Produced: 2020
Subtitles: English Transcript
CreditsDirector and Cinematographer: Richard Chisolm
Executive Producer: Nancy Hackerman
Editor and Co-producer: David Grossbach
Sculptor and Narrator: David Hess
Filmmaker's Bio
Richard Chisolm is an Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker and cinematographer with thirty years of international production experience. He is the director of Cafeteria Man, a feature documentary on school food reform. Deeply committed to the value of real stories and the adventures of real people, Richard has worked for PBS, National Geographic, BBC, Discovery Channel, HBO, and many other broadcast entities. He was a camera operator on the HBO series The Wire and the director of photography for both of ABC’s Hopkins prime time medical documentary series (2000 and 2008). He is also the recipient of a Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Journalism award, two Kodak Vision awards, four CINE Golden Eagles, and is a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Maryland.
Artist's Bio
David Hess works mostly with found materials. The materials he finds, he refers to as rescued objects; they are loaded with history and cultural narrative. At Dartmouth College, Hess studied with the realist wood sculptor Fumio Yoshimura, whose precision and humor had a profound impact on Hess. Hess’s interests in science, engineering and narrative filmmaking also inform his sculpture. Frequently, he explores a precarious balance of elements poised on the verge movement. Hess is represented in Baltimore by Goya Contemporary Gallery. His work can be found in numerous private and public collections including the collections of American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore Museum of Industry, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Sinai Hospital, Thurgood Marshall Airport, Kaiser-Permanente and the Emerson Corporation. In addition, Hess has completed over twenty public art commissions.
Film Festivals
Woodstock Film Festival 2019
Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival 2019
Global Nonviolent Film Festival 2019 (Best Original Idea in a Short Documentary)
Maryland Film Festival 2019
Bethesda Film Fest 2020
Socially Relevant Film Festival NY 2020
The Fine Arts Film Festival 2020
Press
“9 out of 10. Whether discussing constitutional rights, or the dramatic and deathly effects of gun-propelled violence, Gun Show manages to invite all perspectives to the discussion, while presenting decent cases for each in the context of an art project. Whether its rural farmers seeing the weapons as optimistic homages to freedom, community programs for at-risk youth viewing them as a fetishistic love letter to romanticized violence, or an ethical debate with no right answer (or end), Gun Show succeeds in almost every way.”
— Film Threat
“Gun Show provides a provocative, and productively uncomfortable, look at art’s capacity to transform, and to breach the barriers that prevent us from connecting across our differences. Amidst our increasingly heated gun debates, art provides a means of recapturing a sense of shared humanity and common vulnerability."
— Caroline Light | Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University and author of Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense
"David Hess's assault rifle facsimile sculptures challenge both American fetishization of guns and museums' prohibition against handling works of art. Gun Show follows Hess as he presents his creations to vastly different audiences and in contexts both inside and far removed from the art world, demonstrating the power of public art to spark dialogue in diverse audiences and across entrenched political and social divisions."
— Annie Dell'Aria | Assistant Professor of Art History at Miami University
“Gun Show does a remarkable job showing how people from diverse perspectives view guns in radically different ways. For some, Hess’s ‘weapons’ are terrifying. For others, they are thrilling or amusing. This documentary illuminates the chasm we must cross to make headway in the American gun debate.”
— Firmin Debrabander | Author, Do Guns Make Us Free? and Professor of Philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art
“After every new and senseless mass shooting, there is a flickering hope that common sense legislation will prevail, and then it does not. Enter Gun Show, a fresh-faced film that wields the achingly inventive art of David Hess, who has literally created ‘weapons of mass discussion!’ Richard Chisolm’s documentary trumpets a great human aspiration – the end of us-versus-them thinking – revealing a world where we see we are all in it together.”
— Rebecca Hoffberger | Founder/Director, American Visionary Art Museum
“Gun Show is a powerful blend of art and politics with surprising cultural insights.”
— Marshall Curry | Academy Award-winning filmmaker
"Funny. Cool. Scary. Anti-gun. Pro-gun. All different responses to the same works of art: 'Guns' built from objects found around the home of sculptor David Hess. The documentary Gun Show follows Hess as he displays his collection in different communities, and the responses to it highlight how guns mean very different things in different American communities. These meanings are grounded in real, experiential differences with guns, and recognizing this is key to understanding — and possibly overcoming — the polarization of attitudes around guns in our society. The length and open-endedness of Gun Show makes it an ideal resource for those who want to engage in a difficult and polarizing issue."
— David Yamane | Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University
“The fantasy ‘rifles’ sculptor David Hess creates invite us to reconsider our own views on firearms, whatever they may be. Gun Show encourages us to talk with instead of at each other about safer ways to live with our 300 million guns.”
— Craig R. Whitney | Author, Living with Guns: A Liberal's Case for the Second Amendment
"Richard Chisholm's film Gun Show holds a disturbingly realistic mirror up to the reality of America's gun culture, skating across the borders between industry and art, between violence and pure aesthetics. U.S. gun culture -- like any culture -- includes notions of beauty, pragmatics, profit and play, and at its core the psychology of human desire. Gun Show puts them all on display and demonstrates that we still don't know how to account for that culture. Watching it and talking about it should help us structure our understanding."
— Peter Isackson | Writer at Fair Observer
“Richard Chisolm and David Hess have found an engaging and enlightening way to plumb the mystery of America’s fascination with violent weapons.”
— Dan Baum | Author, Gun Guys: A Road Trip
"Guns are tools, totems of pride and patriotism, cherished family heirlooms, sources of terror, symbols of power and resistance, and everything in between. Gun Show follows several exhibits staged by David Hess, whose work involves the crafting of guns out of ordinary household items, and explores the fascinating ways in which these objects exemplify our everyday experience of the material world, while remaining unique in their ability to inspire awe, fear, or devotion. In so doing, it also reveals how a shared artistic experience opens up conversations that transcend the typical divides marking the debates over gun violence and gun rights in the US."
— Jonathan Obert | Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and author of The Six-Shooter State: Public and Private Violence in American Politics
“A testament to the power of art to engender safe, rich, thoughtful conversations. Sometimes maintaining a neutral stance is the only way to create psychological safety, and to help people discover the values that unite them. It might just be possible to move forward from there.” — Elizabeth Gaufberg MD MPH | Director, Center for Professional and Academic Development, Cambridge Health Alliance | Associate Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
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