The Cawein Gallery of Artwork is happy to unveil its 1st exhibition for Slide 2021 — Break Your Pony by Dagny Walton. The showcase will operate through Oct. 7, and is obtainable for viewing weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m, or contact Tyler Brumfield, Art & Design professor and gallery manager at [email protected] to routine an appointment.
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Artist Bio:
Dagny Walton was born in Fort Collins, Colorado, a university town at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. They remaining Colorado to pursue an undergraduate degree in Classical Scientific tests at the College of British Columbia in Vancouver. Their degree mostly centered on mythology and religious techniques, an desire that they have carried into their function on the American West. Considering the fact that leaving Vancouver they stay in Missoula, Montana in which they are pursuing their Masters in fantastic artwork. Though all of their pieces begin off as personal computer data files, they have a short while ago taken up screen-printing as a signifies to give the electronic get the job done lifestyle.
Artist Statement:
To enjoy the American West is to appreciate a profoundly hideous perfect. The glorified heritage of westward growth is racist and blood-splattered. The land is wonderful, but blighted for the sake of extractive industry or victimized by countless wildfires. The myth of the West is a fever desire. Despite the chaos and occasional presence of violence in my items, I normally truly feel comforted by earning them, as nevertheless they are giving the responses to a thing I ought to have always recognized but experienced hardly ever listened to spoken out loud. The tradition and heritage of this place begs to be purchased, for some perception to be created out of the destroy. I enjoy injecting remnants of ancient mythology into my parts — creatures and symbols from millennia of collective unconscious. The existence of these remnants will help me to more make feeling of the West by being familiar with it in terms much more mature than its personal miniscule but turbulent history.
I also hire the use of new symbols in my do the job, producing my own type of modern pantheon for the West. The cowboy is the West’s hero-icon, a symbol of main American values — freedom, toughness, enlargement. His existence is ubiquitous listed here. Western movies parade the cowboy as the gun-toting embodiment of a leathery frontier existence. Painters like Charles Marion Russell imagined the West as Edenic, with the cowboy acting as an unofficial steward for the land and its creatures. Now cowboys provide us cigarettes and difficult liquor in dusty highway gasoline stations.
I use the cowboy’s multi-faceted, multi-reason graphic as the cornerstone of a cultural critique of the American West. I also acquire our mountains and deserts, and these grow to be the backdrop for a planet of masculine fantastique. In my items, I existing cowboys that cross the line amongst toughness and brutality, that enact theatrical displays of violence, and that idly observe the steady, unstoppable destruction of the land we covet.
Nowhere else in the United States is there a principle of regionalism this concrete or this messy, nor is there a further region which so solely encompasses the self-created build of what the United States is. The cowboy, the West’s timeless mythological hero, stands for toughness edging in direction of cruelty, expansion that spills into rapacity, and acquisitiveness that all but ensures whole destruction. Without the cowboy, The united states as we know it wouldn’t exist.