Cowboys, 2025
Cowboys (2025) references photographic materialism and cultural appropriation, utilizing the ephemeral detritus of mass consumption as its primary matrix. In this series, the transparent cellophane wrappers of Marlboro cigarette packs, faintly printed with the iconic, commercialized imagery of the American West, are repurposed as improvised photographic negatives. Placed directly into the carrier of a darkroom enlarger, these discarded plastic skins are projected onto traditional black-and-white silver gelatin paper, collapsing the distance between commercial packaging and formal fine art printmaking.
Through extreme magnification, the romanticized figure of the cowboy is subjected to a radical structural breakdown. As the image is enlarged to monumental proportions, the illusion of the frontier dissolves into the mechanical reality of its own manufacture. The commercial printing raster (the halftone dot matrix of the original packaging) becomes starkly hyper-visible, fracturing the rugged archetype into a spectral, ghostly silhouette. Under the harsh light of the enlarger, the cowboy is stripped of his conquering autonomy, reduced instead to a fragile apparition bound entirely by the rigid geometry of mass reproduction.
Conceptually, the series engages in a direct critical dialogue with Richard Prince’s seminal Cowboys appropriations from the late 1980s. However, while Prince re-photographed the idealized magazine advertisements to expose the simulacra of constructed desire, this work extracts the image directly from the physical artifact of commerce itself. By utilizing the actual plastic wrapper, the resulting prints function as both an indexical trace of consumer waste and a haunting eulogy for the mythos of American masculinity.