CLEVELAND, Ohio – Spaces gallery has a knack for exploring hot-button issues through the lens of art, often with a sense of timing that seems eerily prescient.

The latest example is “America’s Well Armed Militias,’’ an exhibition of work by six artists from Cleveland, Columbus and Chicago commissioned by the gallery to explore factors that have compelled different kinds of groups in America to arm themselves.

The gallery couldn’t have known when it planned the show for the summer of 2019 that this would be the season of horrific mass shootings in El Paso and Odessa, TX, and Dayton, O, that left a total of 38 dead and 73 wounded.

Then again, America has been awash in mass shootings for years. CBS news reported that as of September 1, the 244th day of the year, there were 283 mass shootings in the U.S., according to data compiled by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.

The recent shootings have enflamed the nation and sparked calls for action from the administration of President Donald Trump, who has demurred under pressure from the National Rifle Association.

Meanwhile, as of Thursday, the CEOs of 145 American companies urged the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate to enact bills already introduced in the Democrat-led House of Representatives.

Gut-wrenching show

Curated by Executive Director Christina Vassallo, with Project Coordinator Megan Young and R&D Program Coordinator Karl Anderson, the Spaces show is gripping, thought-provoking and at times gut-wrenching.

It doesn’t maintain a uniformly high level of intensity and clarity, but the cumulative impact is impressive, underscoring the gallery’s willingness to wade into difficult territory – in this case, what it calls the “entwined histories of American culture, social movements, and gun use.’’

The jumping off point for the show is the language of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Who gets to carry guns, and why? Each artist participating in the show examines a particular gun-toting faction with individual works or groups of works accompanied by audio or video recordings of speeches by social or political leaders that embody particular cultural attitudes related to gun use.

For example, a provocative piece by Columbus artist Jared Thorne equates the idea of gangs in American history with images of the Founding Fathers, Sitting Bull, and El Chapo, suggesting that each individual or group relied on firearms to maintain power. His work is accompanied by a recording of a fiery 2014 speech by Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president and CEO of the National Rifle Association.

Stand your ground

Cleveland artist Matthew Deibel explores the “line-in-the-sand” aspect of Stand-Your-Ground laws by covering portions of the gallery floor with sand paintings composed like overlapping Venn diagrams in colors intended to evoke skin tones of blacks, Hispanics and Caucasians.

His work is contextualized by an audio recording of the 2012 cellphone call made to police in Sanford, FL by George Zimmerman before he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen. Zimmerman was later acquitted of all charges in a trial influenced by Florida’s stand-your-ground law.

In the most visceral portion of the show, Chicago artist Michelle Graves explores mass shootings in schools.

Her work is comprised of five canvases violently splattered with red paint, plus five pig hearts that were shot by the artist with commonly used household guns and encased in rectangular blocks of clear acrylic. Each heart is suspended in front of one of the canvases, creating the illusion of blood spraying from living flesh onto the adjacent surface.

It’s a shrill expression of rage about the phenomenon of school shootings, couched in an artistic idiom that put a grisly new twist on Abstract Expressionist painting techniques.

The irony is that an adjacent Homeland Security video, which accompanies the Graves installation, is if anything even more chilling.

Training teachers to respond

The video offers a brief overview of EDGE, The Enhanced Dynamic Geo-Social Environment, an interactive video program that employs on-screen avatars in simulations of school shootings as a way to train school teachers and administrators how to react as “first responders.”

Delivered in icy bureaucratic language, without a drop of irony, the video in effect normalizes the horrors Graves wants to illuminate in her splatter paintings. And that’s truly scary.

The tone of the Spaces show veers this way and that. Hanging right next to the Graves installation is a trio of canvases by Cleveland artist Nikki Woods, called “Westward Expansion.’’

It centers on “Gunslingers,” a large, vibrantly brushed painting of a galloping horses running past a cowboy standing a-la John Wayne amid the red rock magnificence of Monument Valley, firing rounds from his six shooter, held nearly at the phallocentric level of his crotch.

The gallery paired Woods’s painting with a video clip from John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” speech at the 1960 Democratic Convention, which invoked the idea that America’s Manifest Destiny could take a new turn after the supposed closing of the Western frontier in the 19th century.

Winning the West

The issue here is that while most of the Spaces show takes an anti-gun stance, Woods very clearly enjoyed making her paintings, plus a nearby suite of drawings of 19th-century firearms. The gunsmoke curling from the muzzle of her cowboy’s weapon is almost wickedly sensuous.

Nikki Woods shows bravura brushwork in this detail from her painting of a Western gunslinger.

Like Woods’s paintings and drawings, four large watercolors by Cleveland artist Darius Steward in the show are outstanding. They depict a young black boy wrestling and rough-housing with an older boy, perhaps a brother or cousin. The horseplay seems innocent and lighthearted, although there’s a brooding sense that actual violence might occur in the future.

The paintings need no further explanation, no other reason to exist as artworks. But in the context of the show, they are displayed alongside a 1968 audio recording of Bobby Seale, a leader of the Black Panther Party, advocating African-Americans to arm themselves against police brutality.

Somehow, the connection between Steward’s paintings and the Black Panther movement seems forced, as does the artist’s decision to include in the installation a swing hung from chains on the gallery ceiling over a lump of congealed tar on the gallery floor.

A nearby wall label states that: “The swing represents the efforts toward progress and the forces opposing change, while the tar emphasizes the lasting presence of those efforts.”

Sometimes, however, a swing is just a swing. Steward’s installation is an example of how it is not wise to rely on words to convey the meaning of an artwork. If an artwork is truly effective, no words should be required at all.

In fact, here’s a thought. The next time Spaces does a show on a pressing social or political issue, it might want to consider telling participating artists that explanatory verbiage will be kept to near zero, and that gallery walls will be left blank.

Artworks would truly have to speak on their own, without additional curatorial framing or commentary. It would be great to see how artists might react to such a challenge.