Kollodge Gallery

We lived in Alaska for 30 years and there were several telltale indications that you were living in a frontier, one of which was the condition of the road signs.  Sometimes with many miles from one wilderness residence to another on the few highways in Alaska, easily accessible targets were road signs, sometimes with the especially careless shooting at them from moving vehicles.  Consequently, it was actually quite rare to find a pristine sign like this one.

With the above circumstance in mind, jump back a few decades when I was a kid growing up in Glenwood, Minnesota.  Saturday afternoons during football season, sometimes my buddies and I would drive out in the country “road hunting” with shotguns during pheasant season.  It was an exhilarating, bonding adventure and we almost always came home empty handed which was ok.

When I spotted this sign with no bullet holes torn to shreds from shotgun blasts near Fairbanks, I couldn’t help putting the circumstances together with this off-beat attempt at humor related to guns.

The image is intended to suggest someone, without regard to safety in the least,  taking shots out of the passenger’s window at the “Moose-Frequently-Cross- The-Highway-Here” warning sign, even though there’s obviously someone driving toward the shooter and then he misses the sign besides.

Actually, the blemishes in the sky are real bullet holes I made at my gun club with a 45 Colt.  And the reason it’s in an addition of 1 of 1 is because I’m not a good enough shot to put another set of holes in the same place.  Well, maybe “you had to be there” for this to make sense, but that’s the story about this image.