The West Yet Glimmers

I've long been interested in the mythology of the "Hero's Journey" and the narrative potential of the road trip. To go forward, conceptually, with this new body of work I imagined myself wandering across an unpeopled desert landscape searching for clues to a lost civilization and a culture undone. As my journey unfolds, I gather my findings. Bones, skulls, broken parts, strange tools and chain. It is these "imagined" objects that I've carved from wood and assembled into the sculpture for this exhibition. I've made tree-shaped anthropomorphic pieces as an homage to my memory of hikes along the Pacific coast and the Sitka Spruce forests. And other pieces that mimic the undulating motion of dust devils on the arid desert plains. A Dead Cowboy fashioned from cow skulls as an elegy to a familiar archetype that once roamed the area. The "Western Bouquets" are carved from wood and mounted to the wall. I think of them as 3-dimensional journal entries, a record of my travels. They can be thought of as object poems that perhaps function as talismans wording off dangerous encounters on the road.

"The West Glimmers" is at its heart an American Neo-Gothic Dystopic Western in the guise of an art installation. I first set out to make work that referenced Greek Myths such as Sisyphus and Icarus, in fact, began a piece that was a hybrid of both. But I wanted something closer to my own experience. That turned out to be the Hollywood Western and specifically the "cowboy archetype". I believe all of the Greek myths, in one way or another, are played out in the American frontier. I grew up watching Westerns, and was a Boy Scout and, absurdly, an Indian Guide. Just as the process of making work, is one piece suggesting another, my imagined journey is the accumulation of small discoveries adding up to a larger truth.