RANGE

The Range Series, inspired by the cinematic climax of the film The Last Picture Show, revisits the death scene of cinema itself.  Within the movie, The Last Picture Show, we are witness to the death of a small Texas town as symbolized by the closing of its movie house.  In the theater’s final screening, we see a short scene from the movie, Red River, savored by the town’s few remaining residents.  In it, cowboy’s cattle call, like talking heads in extreme close-up, to start the long cattle drive in a movie about progress and movement, laid within a movie about decline and inertia. My drawings, like a movie still, are frames frozen in time, caught somewhere between ecstasy and agony. They act as artistic remnants of our own psychological ambivalence – we are the West, both projected hero and fallen icon.  Somewhere between pleasure and pain, these images flicker forever in the psyche-- manifest as a shimmering, mirage-like myth in the cultural imaginary.