High Plains Drifting
This body of work responds to childhood memories of a grandfather who looked like Sitting Bull and questions about the Indian heritage of my family that like many Midwestern families, has been forgotten and not spoken about. Memories were triggered after spending time in Texas by the similarity of how the Great Plains were taken from the Native Americans in a fashion similar to land taken from Mexico, which now comprises most of Texas. I was interested in the mythology of the American West, and being on the open road, the freedom of drifting and moving. How does movement, drifting create a sense of freedom? I have traveled by car and foot personally exploring the open road mythology, to many of the places, which bear historical witness to the past. Photographed children of families whose lives have been formed by the mythology and reality of The West. These young people reveal a timeless enthusiasm. The photographs are future oriented about a people who are reclaiming their identity. The title borrows from spaghetti westerns, where a cowboy/vacquero wrapped in an Indian blanket, drifts in search of something lost and a possible future.
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