Cowboy, (takes a moment to load)

‘Cowboy’ 5 min loop.

This piece has been shown throughout Europe at various film festivals and exhibitions between other shorts or while people are waiting for the program to begin. It is a self portrait, artist as cowboy and was produced during a 6 week journey round the SW of America, as a response to that landscape and the mythologies that surround and dominate it.

I videoed myself as a cowboy/tourist in front of this quintessentially ‘Western’ landscapes. Over the five minutes of video the smooth containment of the image begins to unravel, as the the ‘home movie’ soundtrack of shuffling feet and wind in the microphone frustrate the closure of the iconic image.

In the conflict of the cinematic image and the home movie sound track, this piece explores the sense of dislocation I felt during this journey between the personal and the grand narratives of place, my own journey and the grand narrative of the ‘West’. It tracks the degeneration from the iconic image to a specific person standing at a specific place.

Seeing it again as I put it up on the site now I think it is as much about cowboys as cowboys are about cinema. How the Cowboy and Western are the ‘Ghost in the Machine’ in much of western cinema.