Fear and coding on view at Hunter Gallery

Fear can be physical: Think of tachycardia, sweating or shortness of breath. But more frequently it’s impalpable, less a concrete happening than clairvoyant dread. Fear hinges on dark predictions. Sometimes it’s an accurate seer and justified in its conclusions. Other times it has no basis in reality, renewed largely by its own adrenaline.

Colloquially we label such persistent, irrational fear as paranoia. The word’s clinical definition is narrower, given that psychiatry examines personal pathologies rather than cultural ones. So it’s often up to artists to diagnose (aesthetically, discursively, at least) wider patterns of public feeling.

Hunter Gallery has mounted one such investigation by Boyd Totin, currently faculty in the visual arts department at Middletown’s St. George’s School. “Poltergiest.stl” opening Saturday is a  multimedia installation consisting of videos, drawings, sculptures, and an assortment of green guns that are nearly functional, were it not for the artist’s interventions.

Totin, a recent graduate of Maryland Institute College of Art’s MFA program, downloaded models for 3D-printable gun parts, specifically the lower receivers for assault weapons. The legality of these blueprints has been hotly contested in federal courts, but like most illicit goods these schematics still circulate online.

“A digital file has the capability to multiply and expand its presence, much like a ghost that haunts and can exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time,” Totin said.

To make these disarmed arms, Totin altered the files, adding glitches and tumor-like growths. The guns’ coloration, meanwhile, recalls the chroma of a green screen, a hue meant to become invisible. Appropriately enough, these homemade arms are known as “ghost guns.”

Thus the show’s title cleverly embodies (disembodies?) the meeting of tangible/intangible. Poltergeists are nasty, bodiless spirits with a notably physical presence, moving objects about or generally causing messes for their unfortunate victims. The second half of the show’s title derives from a filetype used in 3D modeling.

All these factors — physical and digital, fear and disturbance — converged in Totin’s detective work on ghost guns. Totin learned of these unregistered, unmarked and DIY firearms while researching gun enthusiasts, especially those of the a crypto-anarchist stripe. He also contemplated the competing fears driving this culture: the fear of an unknown intruder who could strike at any moment and thus necessitate the acquisition of a gun with which to defend oneself and family and the fear that the government would take away all guns.

So the artist performed his own brand of disarmament by uploading his altered versions of the 3D model files disguised as the functioning versions to file sharing sites.

Someone hoping to download a lower receiver for an AR-15 may instead find one of Totin’s bright green readymades — not usable weapons but attractive pieces of equipment nonetheless. (Perhaps even more absurdly, you too can own a readymade poltergeist by downloading one from Totin’s website.)

Totin’s weapons appear like something you’d find in an arcade shooter, futuristic and slightly unwieldy, while his drawings employ scrambled camo green and scratchy linework, resembling corrupted JPEGs. The sculptures hardly aestheticize violence. They’re pacifistic, highlighting the formal qualities of firearms, and they made me think more deeply about the availability of weapons than my anxious mind would’ve liked.

So I agree with Totin’s musing that “The role of an artist is to combat the amnesia that we all undergo,” a “rapid erasure” characteristic of the news cycle. “Artists have the capabilities to take ideas and issues, slow them down, and present them in thought provoking manners,” he added.

The eerie regularity of mass shootings in the U.S. makes their specifics hard to remember. The typical progressive’s response to this diffuse terror is tougher legislation — reasonable, but less powerful against the specter Totin’s sculptures describe: a ghostly body, something un-killable. Realistically, data is hard to regulate.

Paranoias congregate in barrels, bullets and receivers. One strand concerns tangled, fetishistic ideas of armament and ownership. Another pertains to an arguably more legitimate notion of self-defense. And the final, tender strain fears an ordinary and tragic state of emergency: being shot in public, gunned down, dying a random death.

Totin’s work hints at this final poltergeist. Being invisible and untouchable, this ghoul might justify one’s paranoias. At the very least, it gives fear a body to possess.

‘POLTERGEIST.stl’

Multimedia installation by Boyd Totin

Dec. 1 through Feb. 1, 2019

Hunter Gallery, Drury and Grosvenor Center for the Arts

372 Purgatory Road, Middletown

Opening reception Friday, Jan. 4, 2019, 6-7 p.m.

Gallery hours Mon.-Fri., 9 a.m.-4 p.m., Sat., 9-11 a.m. Closed during winter break from Dec. 14-Jan. 4

(401) 413-1467

stgeorges.edu/huntergallery