Cowboys & Engines Video - 5:58 minutes

A pun, or word play, on the old slang, drawling pronunciation of the classic children’s game  “Cowboys & Indians,” COWBOYS & ENGINES asks the question what would a cowboy be without his “monstrous” other? What’s a Cowboy to do, now that all the Indians have gone?   Can a binary survive as a solo performer? 

All masculine energy and steam machine, the piece places the last living specimen of a cowboy in a diorama-like a large-scale glass display in the Natural History Museum.   Shot in a site-specific safety glass enclosure, the cowboy, a uniquely American cinematic invention, takes his last breath and dances in gestured, slow motion style of the locomotion experiments of Eadweard Muybridge-- father of motion pictures and what was to become the celloid film strip. 

Played by dancer / choreographer, Clove Galilee, our cowboy isn’t actually what he’s portrays himself to be.  The cowboy thing has become a drag and just when he doesn’t want to play anymore, he finds himself trapped in a corner. Inspired by the stylized movements in old Westerns, specifically the old silent era, serialized cowboy flicks of Buck Jones & Tom Mix, COWBOYS & ENGINES explores the Western as a form of modern dance.  A stylized convention of the modern motion picture, “the cowboy” dances against the fake backdrop of a scenic western landscape—the fence and the burlap tent both infused with the projected spirit of our cinematic past.  Our projected heros flicker and fall silent. 

Featuring two early video works,  GOODBYE PARTY, an appropriation and manipulation of Gary Cooper as the classic strong silent hero in “High Noon”, & WESTWARD, a radical reinterpretation of the vintage silent Buck Jones Western  “Indian Attack,” the installation courses with movement and sound.  A bluesy mashup fills the space with a contradiction of sound-- Albert Ayler’s “Goin’ Home” meets Burt Bacharach’s “No Goin’ Home Anymore”, (a song from the soundtrack of George Roy Hill’s modern cowboy epic, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”).

COWBOYS & ENGINES courses with this movement of image and sound and live performance. The cowboy under glass is observed dancing in front of the videos as they play on the walls and wash over her body.  She attempts to replicate the actual movements of the Hollywood idol; struggles to copy the movements exactly, working under the weight of memory—mimicry as master of the art of deception.  Under foot, a model train runs in endless circles upon the ground.  This is familiar territory, one that will be retread until it is worn through.  Put your foot down.