Calamity Jane: Wild goose chase
2023. Stoneware, iron oxide, slip, graphite powder, heel rope lasso, house paint.
Installation, 2’x2’x9’
In my identity as a non-binary person, I navigate the world as a “deceptive woman.” This identity has deep historical connections to the cowgirls of the West who sought ownership of self and land through gender-bending. The expansion of ideologies across the West that these women lived amongst, coined the era of “Manifest Destiny,” is not dissimilar from our stifling and domineering political climate. The churning machine of “American Exceptionalism” in the 18th century spread across land faster than the church could follow. Away from the eye of the church, the albeit waning, wilds of the West held space for those to exist outside of religious values and
their persecution.
As with many areas of history, only a handful of women’s names make it to mainstream knowledge. In Hollywood films, “women played a supporting role to the hero figure. They often represented the voice of the cultured East in contrast with the frontier hero who was torn between the freedom of the West and the taming influence of a woman." The cross-dressing women of the West, Calamity Jane, and Annie Oakley, are likely household names because of the exoticism surrounding their cross-dressing. The sculpture, “Calamity Jane: Wild Goose Chase” references the cowgirl, who legend claims to have won the wildest horse races in the West. Using the imagery of a high-strung horse wrapped in a lasso, the piece insinuates the “taming” and suffocating control colonizers placed on the land and people across this new world. The popular prairie quilt pattern, titled Wild Goose Chase, is used in this work as a storytelling nod to Calamity Jane’s horse races. One of several pioneer-time quilt patterns that emerged as a survival tool, Wild Goose Chase was also a means to document the landscape in this new world.

