“Excerpts from time spent on the American shortgrass prairie”. Jan 2021.
Exhibited as part of the Alquímia Ritmica/Rhythmic Alchemy show, hosted by Ruido/Noise.
Cattle ranching in the western United States is an industry bloated with preconceptions, contradictions, mythology, and misplaced fantasies. As a worker raising cattle on an ecosystem that needs grazing animals to survive, yet has become endangered from decades of mismanaged overgrazing, finding cognitive justice in the work often feels like balancing on a razor’s edge. Ranch bosses do little of the day-to-day labor of keeping animals alive, from moving them to fresh grass to breaking ice for them to drink. Ranch workers are poorly paid and unprotected, but work year-round to care for animals they don’t own and don’t profit from. While many of the visuals of daily ranch life could easily be pulled from any classic Hollywood Western, the actual work is more often than not lonely, dirty, and very cold.