There’s nothing like a good piece of shock art, and Ben Turnbull’s 2009 exhibition “I Don’t Like Mondays” is shock art at its best. On each of a series of seven pockmarked, pen-scratched, and generally use-worn wooden school desks, Turnbull has skillfully carved deadly weapons, and in doing so delivered a powerful comment on the modern epidemic of schoolyard violence.
These tools of destruction – grenades, handguns, knives, and rifles galore – contrast poignantly with the exposed innocence of the sweetly worn school desks. Once imprinted with the images of these deadly weapons, the desks are transformed from relics of childhoods past into piercing reflections on the violence that goes on in so many inner-city schools today.
An elegant synthesis of hard-hitting imagery and accomplished artistry, Turnbull’s work is an altogether interesting comment on the dwindling role of innocence in today’s increasingly violent society.
Click here to see the rest of “I Don’t Like Mondays.”
