Poster Boy (2022- 2023) & Quilt Cowboy (2015)
A series of performances in a costume made from cowboy movie posters, from everywhere except America. Later work explored the anachronitic qualities of the character in any setting, and the continued strangeness of the cowboy motif away from the New World. Originally created for the American Museum in Britain.
Quilt Cowboy (2015). The American Museum in Britain, Bath, UK.
“… the cowboy's movements are comically laboured, stilted and encumbered by the quilted suit's lack of give. He is filmed drawing his quilted guns at a reflection of himself in a mirror in the museum's New Orleans room; in another scene he stands as if cheek to cheek with a statue of Abe Lincoln and later, he disappears into the distance, romantically running over the crest of a hill in the museum's grounds. But these stereotypical gestures are wittily undercut by the complete absence of physical threat or violence, the hallmarks of the classic Hollywood Western.
In the film, the quilted cowboy feels alien, much like the museum's extensive collection of American folk and decorative art itself, housed in a Georgian building and nestled in the very English Somerset landscape. He is out of place, like an anachronistic patchwork puppet, pictured as if seeing the world for the first time.”
“Quilt Cowboy, in the Art Weekender Bristol and Bath”, review on the Frieze Blog, by Lizzie Lloyd, 19/11/2015.
Poster Boy (2023). In and around ruined spaghetti western film sets of the Spainish Hoyo de Manzanares dessert.
Poster Boy (2022). Vulkano Gallery, Göteborg.