• PROJECTS
  • War is the Weapon of Mass Destruction

I have been working with neon since 1973. In 1975 I established Aargon Neon making neon sculpture, commercial neon signs, and neon sign props and special effects neon for the motion picture industry, in which I worked on projects as diverse as Milk, Basic Instinct, the Star Wars series, and Howard the Duck. Recently we made the neon signage for the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. I’ve worked as an instructor teaching neon sculpture at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and the Pilchuck Glass School just north of Seattle.

My sculpture has been shown nationally and internationally since 1977, and in 2010-2011 I had a solo show of my work at the Museum of Neon Art in Los Angeles entitled, “Recycled, Reclaimed, and Reinvented: The Neon Art of Bill Concannon.”

Some of the first work that I did using neon that I considered “art” was political. (I was politically active in college and a political science major. Today I am an elected public official being a governing board member of the John Swett Unified School District in the San Francisco “East Bay” area. Am I bragging or complaining?)

untitled (Abu Ghraib)
2004
Neon, hand cut acrylic, black insulated wire
12 in x 15.5 in x 5 in

“untitled (Abu Ghraib)” was inspired by the Seymour Hersch article in The New Yorker magazine that was published shortly after the story of the abuses at that prison first came to light. Reading the article and seeing the pictures I was horrified and wanted to do a piece based on the iconic “crucifix” image. This piece was made on small scale because I visualized in the same size as a crucifix that might be found in a home.

I was pleased when the author Jon Pahl asked to use a photo of this piece on the cover of his 2010 book, Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence.

My Xmas Wish
1983
Neon, hand cut foam core, spray paint
12 ft x 3 ft x 3 in

My Xmas Wish was from one was the darker periods of the Cold War, made in December of 1983, the same year as Ronald Reagan’s famous “Evil Empire” speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida. At the time Reagan made his remarks there was distressing “saber rattling” and the talk of the survivability of a nuclear war. During my time in Benicia, CA in the eighties, I had a regular gig making Xmas window displays for the local art supply store. This was the third in a series of six such windows, and I made this piece in a really “fast ‘n dirty” street art fashion using foam core and spray paint. The spray painted “plaid’ was supposed to mimic the shading on maps, and the physical scale of the two nations was changed so that the area of the US was approximately the same size as the USSR. My intention was to make a statement that ran counter to the then current political thinking, and to suggest that “we’re not so different,” and that the people of these two nations had more in common than what separated them.