Sean O'Meallie "A Jar of Candy Poppers"

There are 25 unique, wooden gun sculptures in this collection which all fit into a cookie jar with a 10 cent sticker.

Each little gun has a spring-loaded bullet. The bullet can be pushed into the gun, but it pops back out. The bullet never leaves the gun.

The small gun feels good in the hand.

This is non-lethal gun play at a very attractive price.

I wanted to comment on Gun Mania in the USA.

I used to be a full-time toy inventor. Now, I make art objects. I try to make objects that engage, entertain and perhaps expand thinking.

I often begin by considering a common object from popular culture that is preloaded with associations and I consider displacing those predictable associations with new ideas.

I go into play mode.

I start to superimpose unexpected ideas and associations onto that object to inject something new into the visual and mental fields of the viewer. I think it’s useful to challenge my own complacency and reignite an awareness of life’s opportunities.

For ten years I was half of an inventor team that generated ideas for new toys full-time. Our focus was the kind of toy marketed on television by big toy companies such as Fisher Price and Mattel.

I spent a lot of time considering a toy’s field of play, from the child’s development to the mother, who ultimately decides to buy or not, from the package design competing on the store shelf with all the other toys, to the f luctuations in the world petroleum supply, and to the ever-changing cultural trends in play at any moment.

I use everything I learned in the toy business.

Artist Bio: Sean O’Meallie is from New Orleans, Louisiana but has lived in Colorado near the base of Pikes Peak for fifty years.

He has a background in higher education and toy invention.

He produces large-scale public works on occasion but prefers making small one-of-a-kind sculptures in painted hardwoods in his home studio where he plays with existentialist dread and human comedy to popular effect using what he learned in the toy business and that one semester as a Psych major.