The Gospel According to John Ford
2015-2016
While living and teaching in Gallup, New Mexico. I created this series of large-scale paintings.
John Ford shot many of his films around the area of Gallup. The iconic landscape of the region provided an ideal backdrop for the development and cultivation of the myth of the American cowboy, and in many ways, the myth of America itself. It is the physical landscape of the American West that perhaps most defines what it stereotypically means to be American. Obviously, the extreme physicality of this region is without equal and it is therefore an idyllic personification of our collective consciousness. It reflects an individualist ideal of strength, perseverance and free will. Partially because of this awe-inspiring beauty it also functions as a convenient distraction from the realities of the historical and contemporary American West.
However, like so many aspects of America’s history, the historical cowboy is a far cry from the romantic creation of film and literature. And like so many other aspects of our country’s history, this historical cowboy is a character that we have chosen to edit or ignore. Greed, violence and chicanery are historical realities of the American West. The atrocities committed during Westward Expansion are painfully apparent but they are still, for the most part, not welcome storylines in our national allegory, as they seem to undermine the heroic fabrication we have become accustomed to.
In this body of work I chose to edit and ignore imagery from my source material in a manner similar to that of John Ford’s filmmaking or mythmaking in general. However, I chose to edit the narrative to be more fitting of the historical American West. By focusing on relatively minor portions of stills from John Ford’s films, my version of the cowboy is transformed into a despondent individual encountering a bleak landscape and responding to this environment with fear, brutality and self-loathing.
By reinterpreting these heroic stories as tales of defeat and lost hope, I attempted to raise questions about the principles and goals of Manifest Destiny, how the resulting ideology of American Exceptionalism has helped define a national identity and the how the role of the quintessential American hero, the cowboy, has defined masculinity and informed social norms within our culture.
