Set in opposition to mountains, desert plains, and the cobalt blue skies one finds at excessive elevations, Chloe West’s hanging oil work merge Dutch Golden Age iconographies with each mythic and on a regular basis motifs of the American West.
West was born and raised in Wyoming, the peaks and pastures of which proceed to affect her hyperrealistic figurative works. In her present solo exhibition, Video games of Probability at HARPER’S, the artist attracts on European portraiture and nonetheless life traditions in a collection of self-portraits and tableaux difficult stereotypes of the West as a frontier molded by machismo.
“Cowboy Thinker,” for instance, portrays the artist in direct confrontation with the viewer, seated beside a mountain lion cranium at a desk coated with a celestial tapestry. The portray evokes Salomon Koninck’s “A Philosopher” (1635) and works by different Flemish artists of the seventeenth and 18th centuries, who usually depicted alchemists and students of their research accompanied by skulls, gadgets, and paperwork.
West subverts our understanding of cowboy tradition as predominantly masculine, juxtaposing her personal physique with bones, small weapons, and material backdrops that set up a stress between life and dying, folklore and every day life, and the sacred and the profane. Animal bones, thorns, and knives nod to memento mori, a reminder of the impermanence of life, whereas additionally invoking the supernatural and a way of cyclical time. Casting deep, darkish shadows, the obtrusive solar reveals all.
Portraying herself in western put on, West bonds to the continuum of the panorama and its customs and narratives whereas contemplating the best way European attitudes and actions like Manifest Destiny formed our understanding of the area. The artist faucets into legend, historical past, and magical realism to blur distinctions between the previous and modern expertise. “Finally, all through Video games of Probability, West confronts the idealization of frontier heroism, dismantling its pre-established boundaries and increasing upon the legacy it left behind,” the gallery says.
Video games of Probability opens at present and continues by Could 10 in New York Metropolis. Discover extra on the artist’s website and Instagram.
