Artist Statement

    I make fine art installations, performances and ephemeral campaigns which I activate as my alter-ego, the Reverend Roughstock.  Blending the pitch of snake oil salesmen with cowboy-themed Vacation Bible School programs, my artwork synthesizes my favorite shticks.  Having been trained as both a printmaker and a preacher, I fold these disciplines into an odd alloy practice.  In my constructed spaces, I disseminate “messages” verbally, graphically and sculpturally.  Most recently referential of 19th century camp meetings and revivals, these spaces serve both as sets on which I perform and as vehicles for viewers' direct participation with my artworks.  My work challenges viewers as complicit participants through overt socio-religious content and subsequent cultural discussions. 

    My printmaking, installation and performance art combine in large-scale viewer-interactive events.  Through these events, I explore contemporary religious rhetoric and mythologies of the American West.  Each project is a component within a larger framework: a fictional rodeo outreach run by a cowboy evangelist, the Reverend Roughstock. These fine art representations of an itinerant preacher’s countrified revival ministry create “The Jesus Rodeo Ministries Ink.”  Viewers are invited to join in as the congregation at performance art sermons and engage sculptural cowboy carnival games as if strolling through a county fair midway.  The work is humorous, sincere, sacred and profane, honestly attempting to embody the paradoxical structures of love and life, religion and rodeo.

 

 

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