‘Westward Ho’

The covered wagon is a potent symbol of the American West and Manifest Destiny, evoking images of hardy pioneers set out to conquer the wilderness and its indigenous inhabitants.  With the twentieth century, the homesteads of the pioneers morphed into sprawling suburbs, blighting the landscape and threatening the delicate Western ecosystem. In ‘Westward Ho’, past, present and future are conflated. Western expansion and suburban development lay claim to the same landscape, one merging with the other.

The covered wagon in ‘Westward Ho’ is full of identical suburban parcels, each with a single family house and requisite pool. Here, the American Dream of house and pool has rusted like the wheels and ribs of the wagon, and become as much an archaic artifact as the wagon which pulls it along. Dwindling water resources render suburban lawns and swimming pools untenable, and suggest the possibility of future suburban ghost towns, seen in the barren, desert varnish-like surface of the suburban tract. The wagon cover becomes a veil imprinted with the distinctive pattern of suburban development, trailing behind and covering the land in the wagon’s path like the wake of a massive vessel.

The wagon rolls over a field of hands. The hands represent the human cost of the enterprise, the destruction of Native American populations and cultures resulting from westward expansion. The hands, made from found doll molds, are cast of porcelain tinted different shades, standing for the various indigenous nations damaged by Western development.

The American phenomenon of pulling up stakes and moving on once the environment has been degraded is represented here, but one wonders where there is left to go.

Media: Slip-Cast Earthenware and Porcelain, Wood, Metal, Fabric, LED Panel and Strip Lights

Dimensions: 84″ x 40″ x 96″     Date: 2011-2015