Mark Williams,¬† “untitled (red rooster sculpture),” 2006
acrylic on gatorboard.
the artist’s studio
Erector Square
315 Peck St.
Toy soldiers are ominous in miniature. My own childhood obsession with them led me to fill a large wicker basket with warriors in multiple poses along with Revell models of World War II machinery, all easily transportable to the battlefield of the vacant lot next door where I imagine that, even today, a missing plastic corpse or two is still interred.
It was an inventive reversal at a January 2007 anti-war demonstration in Washington to encounter an arts collective called Mouths Wide Open distributing sandwich bags full of these toys, each with a sticker attached reading “Bring Me Home.” They were meant to be scattered as small reminders of what was even then a nearly invisible conflict
It was later that same year that I first encountered Mark Williams’ paintings of demilitarized toy soldiers overwhelmed by elephants and puppies, ducks and bears, like the record of some enlightened child’s conversion of an assassin to a plaything. Don’t we need a monument for our time? My initial thought was that Williams could create a single large scale piece to stand 20 feet high on the Pentagon lawn, but this smaller version might well be duplicated for every front yard in the country.
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