Artist StatementI synthesize my favorite cultural shticks in my installations, performances and printed ephemera. Overlaying the veneer of snake oil salesmen onto the crude interactive social structure of church carnivals, I activate my artworks with an alter ego: The Reverend Roughstock, an emotionally complicated cowboy evangelist. I refer collectively to my artworks for this itinerant preacher’s countrified revival ministry as “Jesus Rodeo Ministries Ink” (sic). Through “The Jesus Rodeo”, I am able to mix humor, design and performance to deconstruct and obfuscate some of our cultural and political discussions around meaning. Referential of 19th century camp revival meetings and the contemporary cowboy church movement, these performance art sermons are accompanied by printed literature, signage and regular invitations for viewers to physically engage with my artworks. I often invite viewers to become impromptu congregations at performance art sermons or hecklers playing cowboy carnival games at a county fair midway. Superficially, The Reverend Roughstock disseminates “messages” verbally, graphically and sculpturally in these performances, installations and ephemeral campaigns. Understood more complexly, I use these artworks to explore religious rhetoric and its creative influence on American myths. The work is humorous, sincere, sacred and profane, embodying the paradoxes of representation, religion and the myths of the American West.
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