WhERE DOES THE WEST BEGIN? (2026)
Where does the West begin? is a series of works on paper (woven drawings, cyanotypes of those woven drawings, and weavings of those cyanotypes) that treat landscape as both image and artifact. The drawings, rendered in graphite and cut into narrow strips before being meticulously woven by hand, carry on their surfaces two stories at once: the depicted terrain and the labor of its reconstruction. I’m playing with the idea of “West” here, not a fixed horizon line, but as a shifting construction; patterns and images that are repeated again and again and again.
I believe that the myth of the American West is inseparable from industrialized processes of reproduction: photographs are circulated and repeated, newspapers are archived, sweeping images of the untouched landscape become flattened versions of their original glory. In this body of work, I mine that visual lineage by working with some of the oldest images ever taken of the American West, and return them to the human hand. The weave appears textile-like but remains drawing, insisting on paper as both material and metaphor.
By cutting, weaving and then replicating via cyanotypes, I am both disrupting and preserving. The landscape is de-historicized, abstracted into a grid, then re-historicized through slow, deliberate reconstruction. I enjoy this act, because it feels like a subtle resistance to the frictionless scroll of digital imagery, and demands viewers to really linger with the surface and its distortions. These works are not about geographic boundaries, beginnings or endings, but my way of chasing that particular moment where an image is perhaps repeated enough to start feel like truth again.
