Shooting Art Gallery

Artist and former soldier explores the art of war.

© By Alexander Stevens the Wellesley Townsman, 28 Feb.2002.

Just days before installing his “kinetic sculpture’ exhibit at the Boston Sculptors Gallery in Newton, Ken Hruby was sounding brave, but unsure."I just don’t know what the hell is going to happen," he says. "I'm usually more of a control freak than this. But I can safely say, I think, no one will get squirted".

Fast forward two weeks, and the man is as good as his word. The exhibit called "Fire Fight" has been up and running since Feb 11, and no visitors have complained about getting hit by friendly fire, or submitted dry cleaning bills for reimbursement.

That doesn't mean that all is going according to plan with the off-beat exhibit that looks and sounds like the creative brainchild of Jackson Pollack and Rube Goldberg. Hruby has employed a mad collection of pipes, pumps, 1950's circuitry and food coloring to create a kind of shooting art gallery.

Five human silhouette targets rotate while brown and green food coloring randomly and intermittently squirts from tubes. Improvised design stains the targets, which are eventually removed – there will be 125 of them when the exhibit is complete on 17 March - and hung with their fellow soldiers in an alcove that Hruby, blessed with a gentle sense of humor, calls "the V.F.W".

Asked if he'd be offended if someone interpreted the exhibit as an anti-war statement, Hruby says without hesitation, "No, not at all."

The military now weaves its way through almost all of Hruby's art. That's because he spend 21 years in the infantry, including tours of duty in South Korea and Vietnam.

Hruby, a 63-year-old teacher of sculpture at the Museum School in Boston, was 30 years old before he ever expressed his creative instincts. That's when he took a course and started welding sculpture, "and I proceeded to make absolutely awful Christmas gifts for everyone."

When he retired from the military in 1982, he had the opportunity to make a nice living working for some big companies that wanted to utilize the skills he learned in the military, or he could face the relative poverty of a life in art. "I decided I wanted to be more creative in the second half of my life then destructive," he says.

Hruby, his wife and their three kids returned to his wife's hometown of Gloucester, and he entered a world about as far removed from the military as one could imagine - he enrolled at the Museum School of Fine Arts, "and fell in love with it. I couldn't have been happier with the environment."

For years, Hruby was an abstract artist, producing steel sculpture that he says, without bravado, still holds up today. But when he saw the movie"Platoon" everything changed. He was no longer content to create within the relative safety of abstraction. The man who had spent years in the mud of the military was now ready to tackle issues with his art.

"'Platoon' was an epiphany for me. It gave me permission to deal with Vietnam and Korea and all that other autobiographical stuff."

Hruby produced an acclaimed solo show called "Tour of Duty" at the Cape Ann Historical Museum in Gloucester last year. And now comes "Fire Fight,", a show that provokes humor, discomfort and thought.

Consider that the silhouettes are stained by their experiences in the gallery, much like a soldier might be stained by his experiences in the military. But Hruby makes the point that it's food coloring, it's not paint. These aren't permanent stains, they will fade and change as the years pass. He's clearly intrigued by the way memories morph over time.

Consider the randomness of the experience these silhouettes endure. "The coloring is random, and it's done without human intervention," says Hruby. "The targets are skewered and they can't squirm out of the experience, and they don't know whether they'll get hit or not, or what they'll get hit with."

Consider, too, the absurdity and monotony of the whole thing. "Fire Fight" was assembled on a budget to, well, save money, but the jerry-rigged mechanics also imply a whimsical, ironic commentary about the military establishment.

"There were so many absolutely ludicrous things that happened [in the service], and when you look at them with 20/20 hindsight, they’re just flat-out funny, "he says. "Humor is something that keeps everyone sane."

But mostly the business of war isn't funny, especially for those involved with Vietnam and its fallout. Hruby says there were years when he didn't even talk about the war with his own brother, who was also in Vietnam. Military people, he says, "circled the wagons" in the face of the hostility bred by Vietnam.

But he's heartened by the civilian change in attitude, as the country now seems to have a greater appreciation for the people who keep it safe. Although he's encouraged to see support for the services, he's circumspect about the war. And he sees no contradiction in a 21-year military man creating an exhibit with a distinctly anti-war flavor.

"One of the axioms that is a universal truth is that veterans are the ones who are most for peace, "he says. "They are the most anti-war folks you'll find. I just don't know any war veterans who are war mongers."