Each week, artist Linus Coraggio highlights one of his pieces—offering insight into the origins, inspirations, and aesthetic intentions behind the artwork. You can find The Weld of the Week here, on Facebook, and on Instagram.

October 11, 2014 Weld of the Week #5

Post-Auto-Bailout Uzi (2009)

Post-Auto-Bailout Uzi (2009) - representational gun sculpture by Linus CoraggioPart of my gun series—obviously—but also part of a series within the gun series where I affixed car emblems to the guns like brand names. I did this as a comment on both Obama's auto industry bailout and his “Cash for Clunkers” program where people with a working old car would trade it in for a discount on a new car (sounds great but the old cars were crushed up mostly which hurt the junkyard industry and made it harder on old car owners to find parts for their older vehicles). So the Cutlass Uzi channels my feelings about wanting to do a number on the senate floor not to kill people, but, rather, to “kill” these bills — taxpayer handouts to industry and investment firms while their excesses of awarding executives million-dollar bonuses (even during the bailout months) was still going on. So the full title of the piece is the “Post-Auto-Bailout Uzi” Machine Gun. It has a Cutlass muscle-car emblem on it as a side joke on “cutlass” (lower-case “c”) being a sword and different from a gun or the old adage about “forging swords into plowshares.”

—Linus Coraggio


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