This painting, Fraying Machismo, inhabits the scratchy aesthetics of a cinematic celluloid film-still. From a now vintage, twentieth century Hollywood production of a nineteenth century frontier story. Mimicking battered, frequently projected film stock, the canvas surface is purposefully abraded, scarred and frayed. The two male horse riders appear blurry, without sharp detail suggesting grainy, low resolution image quality. It’s a visual poem referencing expired cultural notions of masculinity.
See related works The Race and Epic Empire.
