Over the course of the last month, Rob Ford has been many things: the butt of late night talk show jokes, the subject of high-minded political debate, and for the most part, a perplexing figure whose increasingly erratic behaviour has sparked both ridicule and concern.
But as of this Thursday, you'll see him in a whole new light.
Rob Ford is just one of the celebrity portraits to grace the walls of Toronto's De Luca Fine Art as part of artist Viktor Mitic's new show, Point Blank — Art or War. This isn't the first time our mayor's visage has been turned into art (nor is it likely to be the last), but it is the first time his now-internationally-recognizable face has been framed by bullet holes.
That's right. Bullets. From guns. Semi-automatic rifles and pistols, to be exact.
Before you get up in arms, this isn't meant to target the mayor specifically. It's just part of Mitic's technique, which involves painting on canvas and then, well, defining the outline with bullets. The show features "iconic compositions" of Willem Dafoe and Brad Pitt, among others, and previous shot-up subjects include Mickey Mouse, Gandhi and Marilyn Monroe. Not too shabby company for our mayor, whose portrait was only completed last week.
The show is a collection of paintings done over the last few years. When I speak to Mitic, he's in the midst of finishing up a painting and tells me he's holding a gun (an odd thing to hear under any circumstances). Suddenly, he steps away from the phone with an impromptu "listen to this." Then there's the sound of many, many rapid fire gunshots. "That's an AR-16," he clarifies.
Sound gimmicky? Maybe it is—after all, Mitic's website bears the subtitle of "Fine Art Executions." However, his work can be seen as exploring issues of aesthetics, violence, and the ways in which we address gun culture.
Of Ford, Mitic says he was a natural fit, dubbing him an "unusual character" who was well-suited to the format of what he's doing. He points out that he was exploring ideas of recent events at City Hall as a gun battle, and the media's attack as being equivalent to "shooting at him," but adds that he meant "nothing derogatory" by it.
The show runs December 5 until December 28 at De Luca Fine Art, and both Mitic and Corrado De Luca will be in attendance to discuss the show tomorrow from 3 to 4 p.m.
