My current series of paintings Wanted focuses on the nature of the absurd and unique queerness fostered among conservative ideals. This body of work, showcases the duality of being a blatantly queer woman from a conservative upbringing in western ranch country. It includes a series of self-portraits as the mundane clown, the flamboyant cowboy, and other seemingly bizarre characters. It is my own frontier town, filled with my many faces, with a variety of sensations and moments within the experience of queer as “other”. A neon eclectic environment in which the viewer may enter into this queer rebellion of the west. 

Being raised in Idaho along the routes of the Oregon Trail meant being raised in part by that history of the frontier. It meant spending the fourth grade journaling as if I had made the great migration. I was fueled by the story of a real woman, cultivating in a recreation of the trail and the stations along the way. It meant seeing people ride their horses through the town well into my teens. Taking field trips to the old mining towns (ghosts now of what they once were) and learning the stories, how to dig for gold, and taking grave rubbings to research. This was the storied truth of the West we were taught, for before the great migrations of families came the men and women who pioneered these areas, who lived outside of the standards and expectations of the East Coast. It meant queer life in the open and sex workers holding great power within the settlements they built. It meant the people who built the early western towns were those who are often shunned there today. 

This free and progressive place was scrubbed from our histories in favor of a conservative narrative now shaping my homeland. Growing up gay out west for me meant being called a dyke, fag, and told I couldn’t play with the girls on my block, long before I ever knew the meaning of the word “lesbian”. It meant being shunned after coming out by my more religious and right winged friends. However this never should have been the case, based on how the west started the logical steps for it should have been more progressive than all others when it comes to women & LGBT folks’ rights. Look at Wyoming, sex workers, brothels, and women in general held so much political power that when it became a state in June of 1890, it also became the first state to allow women to vote.