High Ridin’ Woman
YVML – High Desert residency, Mojave desert, California 2025
The theme song for Forty Guns analogizes the woman with a horse that needs breaking. […] She cracks her whip in anger, but she offers a new kind of authority that is not afraid of loving.
Russell, Catherine. The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck (2023)
A video shows a brown glass horse standing on a metal stand as the opening titles of Forty Guns are projected onto it at sunset in the Mojave Desert. The 1957 film opens with the introduction of its leading character, played by Barbara Stanwyck, followed by forty men galloping with their horses as the main theme plays. The light of the projection shines through the glass, which I sculpted after the Playmobil figures I used as a child to invent Western-like scenarios. Now, the stomping of the film’s horses reverberates both visually and sonically through the glass of a small horse figure set against the quiet American desert. Named after the movie’s theme song, High Ridin’ Woman was created during the YVML – High Desert residency in California in 2025.
