The ceiling of the Vatican's Gallery of Maps, commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in the 1580s as a declaration of the Church's command over territory, image, and meaning, has been turned on its axis. Engraved in low relief and encapsulated in silver and resin, the vault is no longer something to be gazed up at in submission. It is lowered to the horizon and recast as terrain, every cartouche, fresco panel, and stucco flourish now merely the scenery through which a cowgirl walks her horse, unhurried and unfazed. She follows the seams between the frames, indifferent to a visual program built to overwhelm.
The work stages a collision of eras and ideologies: the Counter-Reformation's apparatus of spectacle against the American West's enduring myth of self-determination. The figures are not engraved but withheld. Cowgirl and horse are the bare, untouched surface of the walnut, defined by absence rather than ornament. In a field saturated with authority, the individual emerges as the one space left unwritten. Renaissance Woman asks what it means for a modern sensibility to inhabit a monument built to command belief, and suggests that the most radical response may be simply to keep walking.
Materials: Black Walnut
23”H x 28”W
The ceiling of the Vatican's Gallery of Maps, commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in the 1580s as a declaration of the Church's command over territory, image, and meaning, has been turned on its axis. Engraved in low relief and encapsulated in silver and resin, the vault is no longer something to be gazed up at in submission. It is lowered to the horizon and recast as terrain, every cartouche, fresco panel, and stucco flourish now merely the scenery through which a cowgirl walks her horse, unhurried and unfazed. She follows the seams between the frames, indifferent to a visual program built to overwhelm.
The work stages a collision of eras and ideologies: the Counter-Reformation's apparatus of spectacle against the American West's enduring myth of self-determination. The figures are not engraved but withheld. Cowgirl and horse are the bare, untouched surface of the walnut, defined by absence rather than ornament. In a field saturated with authority, the individual emerges as the one space left unwritten. Renaissance Woman asks what it means for a modern sensibility to inhabit a monument built to command belief, and suggests that the most radical response may be simply to keep walking.
Materials: Black Walnut
23”H x 28”W
