Break Your Pony
Pre-Candidacy Presentation, November 2021
My work is a critical, hyper-exaggerated representation of the myth of the American West. I would like to refer right at the top here to Richard Slotkin’s definition of the myth of the West as “a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top” (Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, p. 5). The myth of the West promises violence, opportunity, and endless opportunities for violence. This is a topic that I’ve explored since the onset of my graduate degree and I’ve realized that, while I am making work about the myth of the West, I’m also making work about my own personal relationship with the West and my place within it. I’ve come to this topic because of my background and my ties to this region, and I cannot separate that from my more academic and artistic exploration of the myth, the cultural construct of the West.
I grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado, at the time a small, semi-rural city thirty minutes south of the Wyoming border. However, like so many other places in the West, Fort Collins has undergone dramatic transformations within the last decade, to the extent that parts of it are now virtually unrecognizable to a hometowner like me. The geography, the street names, the majority of the architecture where it hasn’t been torn down is all the same, but the feeling of the place is completely alien. The gentrification of Fort Collins and Colorado in general is endemic of what’s happening elsewhere in the West and, at this time, I believe that I’m cleaving to this body of work so much because we’re seeing such a dramatic shift in the Western landscape.
Growing up in Colorado and surrounding states where I have family instilled in me a deep sense of regionalism and connection to the American West. I think that most people have a regional identity, but I don’t think it’s something that we can fully comprehend until we’ve grown up and been afforded the opportunity to experience life somewhere else. For me, that exposure to a new place came when I left Colorado to pursue my undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia.
At the time, that summer after I had graduated high school and was preparing to leave, I had an absurd idea that I wouldn’t feel homesick in this new place. I was 18 and foolish and I was convinced that, because I wasn’t leaving North America or going overseas that I wouldn’t experience culture shock. It took less than a month in Vancouver to be proven wrong. Vancouver was entirely different from anything I was used to, and it took me four years of living in Canada to realize just how American I am, and how ingrained my regional identity as a Westerner is, for better or worse.
While I was in Vancouver, I was getting my undergraduate degree in Classical Studies. Classical Studies is the study of the ancient Mediterranean world: Ancient Greece, Rome, and the civilizations that they came into contact with. My concentration was on Roman religion and the Latin language, so I spent the bulk of four years reading and translating religious texts, odes to specific deities, mythological texts like the Aeneid or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, et cetera. I steeped myself in ancient mythology. I inevitably started to make a connection between these two burgeoning areas of my life: my academic studies into ancient religion, and my increasing understanding of myself as a Westerner. When I say that I’m making work about the mythology of the American West, I mean that quite literally.
It’s possible that some may dismiss my use of ancient ideas and symbols as being outdated and having very little importance in the postmodern soup of 2021. However, I think that these ideas and symbols have held on for so long simply because they are so ancient and they have such deep roots. The Greeks and Romans were doing this stuff 2000 years ago, the Sumerians and Babylonians were doing it 2000 years before them. I cautiously put stock into ideas like Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and Joseph Campbell’s theory of the monomyth -- that there are, for whatever reason, certain symbols, narratives, archetypes, that have a chokehold on our spiritual imagination, things that we simply can’t just evict from our cultural psyche.
So, because of my academic background, I intentionally bring ancient religious theories into my artwork. One of the concepts that I’ve particularly latched onto is the ancient Greek idea of miasma. Miasma is a spiritual pollution or sickness that creeps in when someone within a community has committed a terrible crime. The ripple effect of that crime then acts like a contagion or a curse. It has a parasitic negative effect that can be likened to divine wrath, and which may eventually lead to the community’s total destruction. An example of this is the story of Oedipus Rex. King Laius, Oedipus’ father, rapes a young boy and begets a chain reaction of miasma which ripples through his family and the entire city of Thebes. This leads to Oedipus’s curse, where he must kill his father and sleep with his mother. When Oedipus fulfills that horrible prophecy, his obscene acts lead to a city-wide plague, and eventually the destruction of the entire royal family after Oedipus and his wife/mother find out what they’ve done.
Miasma is comparable to the Hindu and Buddhist concept of Karma. It’s the consequences of poor actions in spiritual form. I believe it’s a concept that is applicable to what’s happened in the West. The massacre and displacement of Native Americans, the abuse and exploitation of the landscape for recreational and for extractive industrial purposes: these actions transgress past a boundary of human morality and survival instinct and, in my belief, act as precursors to an approaching cataclysm, which may be knocking at our door. Now we’re seeing endless summer wildfires, the destruction of natural ecosystems and human habitats, and unprecedented levels of social tension and conflict. I make my work in response to this inescapable feeling of doom. My work is an exorcism of my worst thoughts and anxieties about the West, both its past and its present.
I try to communicate these anxieties through the use of symbolic visuals. One symbol that I use regularly in my work is smoke. Smoke has become a very powerful symbol for social trauma and grief. While smoke can signify cleansing, I use it as a signal that something has gone horribly wrong. For me it recalls the wildfire smoke of Western summers, the smog of heavy industry, and specific events like the eruption of Mount St. Helen’s or the toxic cloud that billowed up after the towers fell on 9/11. An example of my use of smoke can be seen in the following triptych, “Victor, Called Out to the Barn” (2021). There’s a barn fire in the immediate background, but far off in the distance, past the mountains, there’s more smoke. I intend that to be taken to signify that, no matter what unpleasant events are happening within the frame of the piece, there is always something worse happening elsewhere.
I also use the landscape as a symbol. Land, the beauty of land, the possession of it, who has access to land, is an incredibly important and contentious issue in the West. This goes back to the conventions set by Albert Bierstadt and Charlie Russell’s paintings, which portray the Western lands as grandiose and sublime, but still inviting, still conquerable. This is not the tradition that I want to follow. In my work, I want the landscape to be off-putting and strange. This is something that printmaking and using a limited color palette has helped with. When we think of color in nature it conjures up ideas of the overwhelming and dynamic presence of a million different shades and hues, but with the reduced palette my landscapes become stark, unwelcoming, and flat. The landscape, for me, is often something of a tableau -- a stage for the central figures and their actions.
Perhaps the most important symbol I use in my work is the cowboy. He’s a ubiquitous figure in the West. The cowboy, Westward expansion, and the frontier are inextricable from each other. While the cowboy is generally a morally grey figure who can wear both the white and the black hat, he’s largely a cultural hero. Especially in America, where there’s a constant culture war over individualistic concepts of freedom, the black hat cowboy can be a particularly alluring character. Americans are drawn to the heroism of absolute individuality, freedom from all human and divine laws, even or perhaps especially when ensuring your personal freedoms entails getting your hands bloody. My intent is to highlight this brutality, this proclivity to violence, and question these social notions of heroism. I cannot untangle the cowboy from violence in my work.
I’m drawing from a very specific well of cowboy figures. One of my primary influences has been the work of pulp illustrators. Pulp magazines from the early 1900’s were a cheap, mass-produced, easily-accessible form of entertainment. Due to their accessibility, they sold an incredibly potent and popular image of the West and of the cowboy. This image would later be replicated by TV shows like The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke and so many mid-century Western films that would further cement this image within our cultural conscious. So while pulp was incredibly low-brow, it was also massively influential. In pulp, the West was a hyper-masculine, hyper-violent, lawless, amoral landscape. This is the tradition that I’m working from. Violence and its sensationalism has a near-constant presence in my work.
Pulp is also important to me because of an aesthetic theory I’ve taken to heart for my artwork, called the “no brow” or “artertainment”. No brow is an addition to the aesthetic scaling apparatus (high-middle-low) that informs how we assign cultural value to media objects (books, movies, art, music, everything). No brow combines elements of high and low brow culture, so using a low sensational image like a pulp cowboy on the higher plane of social examination and criticism is no brow. This is precisely what pop artists were doing in the 1960’s. They recycled low-brow imagery into high-art products. I recognize the irony of myself, as a grad student in a high-brow setting, employing a very low aesthetic object in my work -- but for me, this is just another incarnation of the no-brow. It’s an upsetting of standard high-art expectations and it’s further enhanced by my use of printmaking as a medium, which is fairly proletariat and shirks the standard fine-art concepts of exclusivity and Walter Benjamin’s theory of the aura.
I also look to Ukiyo-e prints from 1800’s Japan. They’re clearly beautiful and have informed certain aesthetic qualities of my work, but I’m particularly interested in the production and dissemination process. Ukiyo-e prints’ primary historic purpose was to distribute social information. They depicted scenes of the royal court, important historical figures, and contemporary pop culture figures like kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers. This is particularly important because, due to the low cost of production and the ease of creation, these prints were some of the first aesthetic objects middle-class Japanese people would be able to own, but they were still distributing agents of social knowledge.
Both pulp and Ukiyo-e have been very useful to me because I was a complete beginner to printmaking at the start of my MFA program and I still consider myself fairly new to the process. This is the first time in my life that I’ve been able to mass-produce work in any kind of meaningful way and it’s been strange fitting myself into this new medium, especially when the conversation in fine art so often revolves around exclusivity. However, looking to pulp and Ukiyo-e for guidance has helped me understand the tradition of using art as a vehicle for social information. The nationalistic concept of Manifest Destiny and the explosive expansion into the American West were similarly promoted by widely-distributed printed pamphlets and artwork that promised only fertile land and opportunity, just as pulp Westerns would later popularize the image of the West as brutal and violent. This perpetuation of the Western myth was so successful that it’s become completely ingrained in our social psyche even on an international scale, as we can see in Italian spaghetti-westerns.
To wrap this up, I’d like to briefly discuss where I hope for my work to go as I move towards my thesis. Narrative and story-telling have always been important to my work, but I want to take this further. I’m interested in potentially working with text or with a sequential series of pieces that would read essentially like a short story. I’m also interested in jumping forward in time and examining the new West or the “Post-West”. Up to this point in my degree, I’ve largely stuck to looking at the foundations of the West, old fundamental ideas of what the West was, but I’ve recently become more interested in looking at what the West has become. This is the West that I myself am a part of and I’m curious to examine the legacy that we have inherited. How do we engage with the myth of the American West today? What’s changed, and what remains?
