KC Willis, who lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, explores this resonant wealth of imagery through the art of mixed media fiber collage in her solo exhibition "Romance and Rifles," at Noho Gallery, 168 Mercer Street, from June 26 through July 15. (There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, June 30, from 3 to 6 PM.)
Growing up in a small Midwestern town in the 1960s with a father who loved the Old West, Willis was steeped in the country music of the Sons of the Pioneers, the films of Roy Rogers and John Wayne, and the adventures of all the cowpokes who mosied across the family TV screen. Later, she immersed herself in the true-life stories of cow girls like Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, and vowed to migrate west when she grew up.
At 25, she ended up in Los Angeles—not quite as far west as she had hoped to be, but at least she was a professional country singer by then, which brought her a little closer to her childhood dreams of becoming a cow girl. In her thirties she wrote a Western Novel with a sharpshooting cowgirl heroine that was published by Harper Collins. And a few years later, she finally made it all the way west to Santa Fe, where she turned from painting to what she calls "mixed media cowgirl collage with attitude."
Her pieces begin with unprimed canvas, which she launders and stains with coffee. She then burns the frayed edges of the canvas and layers it with glued or stitched pillow ticking, vintage calico and old velvet brocades, to create a richly patterned and textured surface. Finally, she adds the photo transfer images of the cowgirl characters who figure prominently in her compositions. While these images, culled from old photographs and postcards that Willis finds in flea markets and antique shops, are of actual women of the Old West, the artist takes the poetic liberty of inventing quotes for them, which she hand letters and adds to the pieces. Thus, she refers to her works as "fiber fiction," a term that she is currently trademarking.
In one mixed media piece called "Slightly Sentimental Sadie," for example, the stately figure of Sadie Austin, decked out in a black Stetson and full cowgirl regalia with a long-barrelled six shooter in her belt and a rifle in one hand is set against a decorative floral background that provides a frilly feminine contrast to her no-nonsense, armed-to-the-teeth persona. The quote below the photo, delineated in a graceful script, add to the intriguing irony: "I like my guns. they don't behave any differently 'cause I'm a female."
In another work by willis entitled "One Little Rifle," the classical profile of Annie Oakley, a star on here Stetson, her chest festooned with sharpshooter medals is set medals is set within an especially intricate and tactile composition of layered and patterned fabrics, including striped mattress ticking, ornate brocades, and delicate lace. Their contrasting textures, creating a visual richness reminiscent of some of Kurt Schwitters' "Merz" collages and constructions, set off the photo transfer image and the hand-lettered quote: "Who would have thought that you could conquer the world with one little rifle."
In larger mixed media fiber collages, such as "The Cowboy Girls," several photo transfer images of different women of the Old West are combined with an array of fabrics, their colors, textures and patterns creating intricate compositions enhanced by the stains and burns that give willis' surfaces a weathered quality. this adds to the sense that, as one viewer put it, these pieces were pulled from annie Oakley's trunk on the back of a convered wagon on the prarie.
Since the cowboy has been featured much more prominently in most Old West mythology than has the cowgirl, KC Willis' foregrounding of gun-toting women in her fiber collages amounts to a statement of feminine empowerment. This exhilarating sense of empowerment is reflected in the aggressive tone of titles such as "Girl's Got a Gun "Annie's Attitude," and "Martha Means It," as well as the hand written statements that the artist concocts for her fiber fictions, such as "It was never my intention to be a lady," or "Never did wanna marry," or "I can shoot as good as any man.., and look better doin' it."
Such pithy, provocative, tongue-in- cheek statements relate Willis' sensibility to the conceptual texts of artists such as Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, just as the materials that she uses relate her pieces to the movement of artists who elevate traditional women's craft mediums to the level of high art. KC Willis, however, has her own wry approach to both words and images, and her cowgirl iconography adds an element of subjective fantasy to her work that transcends sexual politics. Indeed, her total identification with the women of the Old West that she depicts is implicit in the way that she talks about them, saying, "When I'm in my studio, surrounded by these incredible women, I don't have to put much effort into their 'quotes.' If I listen hard enough, they will whisper in my ear. Calamity Jane catches me so off guard sometimes that I laugh out loud at some of the things she 'says.' My dogs look at me like I'm crazy."
Her belief in the characters that populate her "fiber fictions" is contagious. She draws the viewer to them as well, making us aware that the Old West was not really the "man's world" that is depicted in Max Brand novels and Hollywood films. Indeed, the art of KC Willis pays tribute to the strong and fascinating women who helped to make the west wild.
––J. Sanders Eaton
