How The West Was Won

PROPOSAL FOR SITE WORK: How The West Was Won

Site: Outside Barn, Deep End Ranch
Funded by Interdisciplinary Grant

Addressing cultural miscegenation as it relates to the myth of the West and its misgivings, a series of collage animations will be produced in collaboration with animation artist and filmmaker Rhys Ernst (MFA1, Film/ Video). Together, using our different practices, we are seeking to bring ideas of deformation and hybridization to problematize the ideal space of both agricultural and cultural aesthetics as they relate to sexuality, labor, and the iconographic. The looping animation piece, initially shot upon my chest, will then be projected upon my back during a live-action performance piece to take place outside the barn the night of May 17, 2009 at the Deep End Ranch. The work attempts to respond to the negation of race, labor, and sexuality within the workings of the agricultural industry, which we take to be emblematic of the so-called nature-culture divide that prioritizes the ideal versus the hybrid and the deformed, and subjugates the labor that upholds it. Our work attempts to re-embed these issues into the landscape and architecture to bring forth a self-consciousness that might yield a new identity for the Deep End Ranch.