Megan Hansen
Artist Statement
Wild West Show is a photographic body of work that utilizes appropriation, collage, and tableaux to speak to a collective relationship and understanding of the American West. I collapse the history and myths of Western Americana into imagery that is both a satire and a love letter. Backdrops are created with pieces of landscapes from my own and found photographs to create a scene that is believable at first glance, but impossible and untrue in reality. They represent the symbolically interchangeable sublime nature of Western landscape. These collages are then used as backings for a set featuring similarly farcical costume, props, and scenarios. Toy props are stand-ins for the real thing, and a reminder of inauthenticity that is often present in pop culture memory of the fantastical West. Costumes are embellished with cheap jewels and fringe somewhat haphazardly, “like a rhinestone cowboy,” yearning for a time period and a heroic glory that is impossible to reach on a real timeline. Vernacular imagery is further incorporated to call up the non-linear nature of history, as well as ideas of God and manifest destiny that carried Western expansion. rnWhen the final image is realized, there are several layers that begin to collapse onto one another, situated in humor and fantasy, falling apart like the fragile notion of what the West is and stands for within American identity. Wild West Show is work that is personal to me, as someone that has grown up and resided in the Western United States in both rural and urban areas. But it is also work that I hope will allow anyone to reflect their own perceptions and identities and subconsciously into. When writing about his famous traveling vaudeville Wild West Show, Buffalo Bill Cody said it was his “effort, in depicting the West, to depict it as it was.” I do the something similar—depicting authenticity of the American West and Western identity as we understand it in the past and present, through measures of inauthenticity.
Megan Hansen| Ellensburg, WA