When the fascists march with bullet proof vests, show up with inflatable frogs.
Charlotte Richardson-Deppe is a queer artist working between performance and soft sculpture. Their work explores themes of interdependence, endurance, and bodily autonomy. Charlotte uses recycled textiles to create playful and eerie objects, wearables, and installations.
Richardson-Deppe created the soft sculpture series Death Rattles while serving as the Barstow Artist-in-Residence at Central Michigan University in fall 2025. Works from Death Rattles have been exhibited at the University Art Gallery at Central Michigan University and the Silber Gallery at Goucher College.
This essay is co-written by Charlotte (artist-critic) and Abigail Dahlke (critic). This piece emerged from conversations between Richardson-Deppe and Dahlke while Richardson-Deppe was creating Death Rattles. In counterdistinction to the rigid boundary often placed between artist and critic, here Charlotte is both the creator of the artworks and an active partner in the analysis and discussion of the work.
The sculptures of Death Rattles invite viewers to activate the work and thus become participants. With this essay we (Charlotte and Abigail) hope to trouble the traditional academic separation of artist and critic. By blending the two, our analysis contains internal and external perspectives on the project.
While this piece is co-written, we will occasionally specify which author is speaking with parentheticals.
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In October 2025, federal agents and armed masked men working on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) descended on Portland, OR. Protester Seth Todd donned an inflatable frog costume. He stepped forward. The police stepped back. Todd was pepper sprayed through the air vent in the costume. The next night, there were more inflatable frogs outside the ICE detention facility.
Fascism depends on a projection of the aesthetics of power in order to maintain authority. These brave and buoyant frogs eschew the posturing inherent in aesthetic brinksmanship which strives to project images of strength, conformity, and authority. But here, the frogs draw on the visual language of humor and absurdity to contrast ICE’s tactical aesthetics, making the power of the costumes undeniable.
As more cities have endured this most recent wave of fascistic repression, the defensive power of the whimsical has emerged again and again. During the spring 2026 ICE occupation of Minneapolis, the In Heart of the Beast Puppet theater unfurled a giant fabric bird—part muppet, part battle standard—that stretched across the street during a march protesting the shooting of Renée Macklin Good and the ongoing atrocities of the ICE occupation. From Vietnam War protests in the 1970s to the 2020 murder of George Floyd, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater has used oversized papier-maché and fabric creations to protest in community and mock oppressive systems. This bird is an act of absurd, soaring levity in response to militant violence.
As the line between war and peace dissolves, the aesthetic of the tactical has expanded in lockstep with the militarization of our police. Police ranks swell with federal agents from a byzantine jumble of three-letter agencies. The aesthetics of strength both drive and are driven by the expansion and entrenchment of fascism. Tactical aesthetics are meant to project ruggedness, utility, and decisive force. Ornamentation, craftsmanship, and fashion are anathema to a tactical aesthetic, which blurs the lines between our conceptions of effectiveness, utility, and violence.
Mass-produced items are effective at enforcing conformity. This aesthetic of preparedness for confrontation thus invites confrontation. To respond to this hardness with equally inflexible posturing is ultimately self-defeating. When one side wants confrontation, the only viable response is to show flexibility. This should not be confused with contrition, or even nonviolence. Instead, we argue that our resistance is most effective when we sabotage the symbolic language of oppressors, meeting rigidity with flexibility and self-seriousness with collective joy. When the fascists march with bullet proof vests, show up with inflatable frogs.
Charlotte Richardson-Deppe’s soft sculpture series Death Rattles, which consists of squishy constructions of limb-like tubes, directly challenges tactical aesthetics. Richardson-Deppe’s soft sculptures are sewn in a patchwork of colorful fabrics and hung on wall-mounted pegs. Viewers are invited to take them off the wall and hold them. In hand, they are light but not delicate: they invite squeezing manipulations that reveal their inner mechanisms of rattles and squeakers. These result in a whimsical and surprising sonic landscape of honks and tinkling bells, at odds with the referent form we have yet failed to describe: they are shaped in a likeness of guns.
Where tactical aesthetics demand conformity, Richardson-Deppe’s “guns” are each unique. Where war requires fabric that stops bullets, these guns are hand sewn with clothes off our own (collective) backs. Where the military operator strains for deadly silence, these guns squeak, crackle, and rattle, giving away an operation before it even begins. This is the failure of your special equipment, the squeaky step on the stairs, the fumble, slip, and crunch: a crack in the shield.
In contrast to the olive and black of covert operations, these soft guns are brightly-colored, visually more aligned with an elementary school classroom than a boot camp. The Death Rattles guns reject precise, intended functionality. Instead, they invite the audience to hold them in many ways without prescribing a single mode of interaction. Their negative space is stretchy and moldable, ensuring the participant freedom to define the edges of their own body in relation to the gun. There is no right way to wield a soft gun.
Not everything that is soft is benign; not everything that is pliant is welcoming; and not everything childish is innocuous. While maintaining an inviting and playful toy-like facade, the sculptures of Death Rattles are also distinctly bodylike. Created from discarded clothing, the echoes of bodies are built into their structures, informing associations of limbs, organs, and genitalia.
These bent and patchwork sculptures evoke intestines or amputated limbs sutured together: the collected products of violence. Taken at face value, this can be evaluated as the cause and effect of a gun combined into one hybrid form: a gun composed of the gore which it might create.
However, we must further consider the interactive component of Death Rattles: the process of discovery that connects the viewer-participant, located in their own body, to the piece. This positions the viewer-participant as an active agent of the work.
The intestinal, organic quality of the soft guns evoke the very viscera a gun destroys (or creates). Gore itself is dehumanized, inert, and irretrievably moving toward decay. In contrast, these sculptures are reactive and responsive. The viewer-participant animates them through movement and sound. Thus they become a limb-like extension of the participant’s own body. If these guns are bodies—if these tubes are guts—then these guns are an extension of the participant’s hand.
Death Rattles rejects the distancing effects of an increasingly technologized world. The organic quality of these soft guns returns a direct embodied reality to the aesthetics of war, while masking and contrasting warlike and bodily aesthetics with playful color and form.
In Death Rattles, we return to a collapse: if nothing else, we have our bodies.
Death Rattles problematizes the classic ergonomics of a gun. Each sculpture is gun-like while defying every common-sense design choice that defines a gun’s relationship to its user. There is no correct way to hold Richardson-Deppe’s guns. They are comfortable and forgiving, favoring flexibility. They are guns that invite interaction and exploration, guns that are “safe.” None of the sculptures are symmetrical and there is not a clear orientation in which they are meant to be held. Should you cradle it like a teddy bear? Brandish it like a weapon? Hold it at arms length like a carcass? The handler’s manipulation is exploratory and humorous, inevitably resulting in frequent but unexpected clown-like eruptions of sound.
Ultimately, the “guns” of Death Rattles are guns that invite connection, rather than demarcate separation. They induce reflection that is not contained to individual minds, but is inherently collective, given how they puncture a gallery setting with honks and buzzes that ricochet around the space. Galleries are often expected to be sterile, serious, and quiet spaces for internal contemplation. Via tactile and sonic means, Death Rattles instead elicits shared experience and community interaction.
Sonic tactics have been used on a grander scale in recent anti-ICE protests. In spring 2026 protests in Minneapolis, musicians and activists played music all night in front of hotels catering to ICE personnel. Fascism requires complacency, and a marching band on your doorstep is an absurd breach of that social contract. In order for fascism to spread, it depends on the pacifying norms of the status quo to lull a population into simply going on with their lives. Thus, resistance must be dramatic enough to pierce this quotidian veil of normalcy. The music of Minneapolis protestors disrupted the alleged domestic order of an otherwise tranquil night. These sonic protests against fascistic incursion signal the exceptional urgency of these circumstances. Violence begets a tuba outside your hotel room.
The soft guns of Death Rattles combine the materials of mass production with the irregular construction of the handmade. These little bodies are swathed in cheap synthetic fabrics cut from thrifted clothing, and animated by mass-produced, Amazon-bulk-purchased plastic organs. The beating hearts and breathing lungs of the soft guns are squeakers, bells, and pull-string vibrating motors. This is material resonance: each chosen material, with its own history, connotations, and limitations, strengthens and supports the conceptual aims of the piece.
For $6.99, one can have “50 squeakers for Dog Toys, 30mm Noise Maker Insert Replacement for Pet Supply Cat Toys” delivered to their house. For $7.49, “20 pcs Rattle Balls Inserts Rattle Box Repair Doll Noise Maker Insert Rattles Ball for Animal Puppy Doll Pet (24mm),” and for $8.59, “6 pcs DIY Movement Plush Toy Supply – DIY Accessory Plush Vibration Motor Kit Pull String Mechanism for Crafting Repairing Creative Toy Projects.” This search engine optimization psychobabble means anyone can have whatever they want at their door in two days flat. This would not be possible in a world in which everyone was paid fairly for their work. Technological marvel is—simultaneously, necessarily—social depravity. Gun components, too, are marvels of material, labor, and technology revelations and degradations alike.
These soft guns are tactile embodiments of rejection and rescue. Thrifted clothing is rejected and discarded from society. Originally mass-market imports to the US from overseas, these garments are now unwanted echoes of our bodies become too old, too thick, too thin, or too dirty. Eventually donated to a thrift store—usually nothing more than a brief feel-good diversion from an untimely eternal grave polluting some other place, usually in the Global South, with microplastics and decay—these garments were slated for abandonment. Instead, they have been plucked for the higher purpose of art and given a new task. Every echo of their hybrid plastic past in factories that formed them in the likeness of our bodies is now utilized to consider bodies in a different way.
The guns’ innards, too, are plastic. Poly-fil is a fluffy, shredded plastic product, used primarily to fill pillows and stuffed animals. Originally bought new, I (Charlotte) have recycled this polyfil in and out of multiple sculptures in the last few years. As it is stuffed into tubes, a fine layer of plastic dust sifts through the air and settles on all surrounding surfaces, permeating the world with more and more plastic. This environmental microdisaster, on the scale of one pair of hands, one home, also represents the sickness at the heart of many of the issues named here: consumerism, capitalism, overproduction, and waste. Just like their violent older siblings—real, dangerous guns—these soft guns overflow with contradictions. Formed primarily of mass-produced, plastic materials, they will never rot.
In times of strife, we grasp for what we can. Sometimes, it rattles or honks. Death Rattles occupies an ambiguous space that is both menacing and whimsical, revealing a false dichotomy between play, toys, and fantasy; action, equipment, and violence. When the aesthetics of martial domination and fantasies of violence take on a life of their own, fascists are playing soldiers on battlefields of their own invention. Death Rattles invites a new paradigm of tactical contemplation.
We often imagine the violent as serious and the whimsical as harmless. This binary opposition obscures the reality of both. Embedded within the universal experience of playing soldiers is real violence and real whimsy. Play and violence are acts of the body. Death Rattles exposes the inextricability of violence from play, and of both violence and play from their deeply-lodged places in our bodies and minds. I (Charlotte) offer this body of work that is made not just to be seen, but also to be heard and touched.
Death Rattles elicits laughter from symbols of violence and play from dislodged limbs, turning tactical aesthetics on its head with primary colors and pliable forms. We want a future where guns cannot separate the oppressor from the oppressed, where rigid systems are made malleable and violent tools rendered ineffectual. Death Rattles notices the violent contradictions of a collapsing empire, and offers them to you to hold, squish, and squeak.
Abigail Dahlke is a writer and wine seller living in Baltimore, MD. She graduated from Grinnell College where she ostensibly majored in Biology but more importantly was the sole and founding member of Juggling Club.
Charlotte Richardson-Deppe is a queer artist working between performance and soft sculpture. They are based in the Bay Area and teach sculpture at University of the Pacific. You can find them online at www.charlotte-rd.com or @charbroiled.
All article photos and video are courtesy of the artist.