the myth of the frontier
This country has always felt to me like an out of control experiment. A fiction that became a manifestation. As a people we seem to embrace a superficial fantasy of ourselves. It requires a lot of blind faith and promotion. It is a land full of romantic stories, bigger than life ambitions, a winner-take-all mentality that leaves us lost in a swirl of desire and longing.
This series is mostly collage, an assemblage of conflicting ideas. It attempts to reconstitute the Myth of America, particularly the settling of the west. I wanted to capture the sad fate of our fantasies, trying too hard to live up to our shoot from the hip heroes. Where does the movie end and life begin? I love everything about these contradictions, this is not a put down of our national obsessions but a celebration of weird old America; the good, the bad, and the ugly.