Riding into the Wild West

Artists Suky Best and Rory Hamilton have been collaborating since 2004 on video and printed works. Best is an artist working with print, animation, and video. She has exhibited at the Baltic Gateshead & Art Now Lightbox at Tate Britain (collaboration with Hamilton) and recently had a solo exhibition and publication, The Return of the Native at the Pump House Gallery London. Hamilton has worked on digital screen-based and installation projects for over ten years.

Danielle Arnaud was the curator of Video Art in the Cinema at the Gate Cinema in London this past November, featuring works by artists Suky Best and Rory Hamilton.   

Suky Best & Rory Hamilton, Rodeo, 2007/2008. Screen prints. Courtesy of the artists and Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art

 

In 2002 he completed a work titled Generic Sci-Fi Quarry (with Jon Rogers) as part of the TV Swansong project, which was a large-scale outdoor event using multi-screen projections and specially commissioned sound. He has long been a keen fan of western movies.

 

Both independent artists, Best and Hamilton have found new ways of working together. In 2005 they exhibited Wild West, a series of works exploring cowboy films. Wild West was based on generic scenes within these narratives. Themes of heroism; the lone stranger putting things right; the anti-hero, cowboys, and their leading ladies; and the gunfight. The work has a strong aesthetic flavour, hand-worked, yet graphically clean, using visual stereotypes while exposing their banality and frailty. Flat clear silhouettes replace the dusty blur of the Wild West.

 

In both the video and print works only the protagonist and/or his companion (be they horse, tracker, or love interest) are transcribed onto the finished image. Every extraneous detail is removed. When a cowboy ties up a horse and walks into a building, the horse and rider are clearly depicted. The building only exists when the rider walks behind a column or railing. The cowboy defines the world around him. Sections where the hero is out of shot are left blank. The hand-drawn nature of the video animations shows the artists have decided in every frame how to interpret the cinematic image and what to include or discard. This also exposes the editing and construction of the original footage. Most of the films demonstrate either a transcription of a generic scene or a collection of scenes from several cowboy movies, which were chosen for their universality—narrative events that appear repeatedly in westerns from every era.

 

Best and Hamilton are currently working on Rodeo, a series of projected video pieces and large-scale screen prints. Unlike the previous work Wild West, where the action was materialized by the black silhouettes of the protagonists against a white background, Rodeo features the rider and the bull or horse in vibrant colors. The power and emotion of the struggle between man and beast is heightened by the strong bold visuals. In keeping with the traditional depictions of the rodeo, the animation either takes place in powerful, elegant slow motion or frantic real time as eight seconds is the amount of time a bull rider must stay on to achieve a score.

 

One of the interesting aspects about Rodeo is that not only is it a very fast and intense competition between the rider and the animal, the rider and the animal each have their own unique personalities. Bulls compete with their aspiring riders over and over in different venues, with bulls having names and individual characters. These characters can be seen as an extension of celebrity culture creating equality between man and animal.

 

The result of Best and Hamilton’s teamwork proves organic, fresh, and exciting. “We collaborate equally,” Best and Hamilton said, “All decisions are made together, then we go off and draw separately, coming together to set rules about how decisions are made and to assemble the work.”