Typewriter Guns by Eric Nado

Since I am often asked what other art I collect outside of comics, I have created this gallery. Completely off topic but perhaps you will see the connection to comic art even if it is not comic art. I see it!

Here are two really cool sculptures. They are part of a triptych done for a gallery show in tribute of the Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip. More about them later.

The artist Eric Nado is out of Winnipeg and he takes apart old typewriters and creates these machine gun sculptures. He uses almost all of the typewriter with in the sculpture and each sculpture is made from only one typewriter (except the text bars). When I saw these at the exhibition and they had not been sold, I had a sense they would soon end up on my walls. The exhibition was almost over so I waited 3 days until it was over to contact the gallery owner about working out a deal on the piece. They had sold one of the pieces with 2 of the text bars. We were able to come to terms on remaining pieces and I picked them up yesterday from a local gallery here in Toronto.

About the art. The pieces are quite open to individual interpretation. A variation on the pen is mightier than the sword trope. Maybe it is about the power of words and how they can kill and be weaponized especially relevant in our social media driven society today. There is an environmental message in the re-purposing aspect of the sculpture. The artist speaks of how his memories of the sound of typewriter keys as a child as his parents typed reminded him of gunfire and this translates well in this works. There is also the ghost of hundreds of thousands of words and phrases that were written on these machines embedded in the rollers and keys. There is a unique history to each piece that is worthy of some pause.

The two you see are an Underwood and Olivetti. The text is from a song by The Tragically Hip called Poets and fits nicely with the pieces and themes.

A bit more about The Tragically Hip or The Hip as usually referred to in Canada. They are Canadian royalty and inseparable from the fabric of our identity. There is no US equivalent to what the Hip means to Canadians, perhaps REM and Bruce Springsteen combined in their prime. Gord Downie, the lead singer died of brain cancer in 2017. They gave the country and their fans an emotional farewell tour after receiving the terminal diagnosis. The final concert of their tour was broadcast nationwide and you will find it hard to find a Canadian to talk about the performance and not tear up. A country mourned the inevitable and at his funeral, Prime Minsither Justin Trudeau said "Our buddy Gord, who loved this country with everything he had—and not just loved it in a nebulous, 'Oh, I love Canada' way. He loved every hidden corner, every story, every aspect of this country that he celebrated his whole life." Gord and the Hip's sensitivities towards the struggles of every day Canadians and our First Nations are intertwined and mixed with experiences and places uniquely Canadian. There will never be another Tragically Hip.