Robin Starbuck "Cowboys and Sharpened Sticks"

Soho20 Chelsea Gallery

poster for Robin Starbuck "Cowboys and Sharpened Sticks"

This event has ended.

The drawings and animation in this exhibit correspond to an Identity project I have been working on for several years. This project involves the protracted practice of filming native people on reservations and interviewing non-Indians (off the reservations) who feel they have a specialized affinity to what they consider native. My drawings for the Cowboys and Sharpened Sticks exhibit are selections from a group of works I made during a fellowship in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming. They were made during the same time I was filming on a near-by reservation and represent both the landscape of that place and the ideas and emotions I was filtering as a result of my film work. In this particular region of the west summer days are gruelingly hot. It became my habit there to rise before dawn and to draw in the only cool hours of the day images and objects I had come across in the field. This is a normative process for an artist, the reconstruction of an encounter through the practice of gesture, and one I found extraordinary valuable in translating the complexity of confrontations I was experiencing in my film work. An older form of art making for me, the title ‘sharpened sticks’ acknowledges the extravagance of a return to simple gesture and the beauty this describes. Included in the exhibit are cowboy lithographs I pulled in Italy, again referring tangentially to my film work. Drawn from objects in my toy cowboy collection they provide a post pop-style critique of the fascination America has with the iconic cowboy: rugged individualism, open space, expansion of the colonialist dream. The animated short, Tin Boy, included in this exhibit developed from the same source.

Media

Schedule

from March 31, 2009 to April 25, 2009

Opening Reception on 2009-04-11 from 15:00 to 18:00

Artist(s)

Robin Starbuck

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