David Jones and Shelby Shadwell
at 222 Shelby Street Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Recommendation by Kathryn M. Davis
Wyoming transplants David Jones and Shelby Shadwell’s exhibition "True West" presents the iconic open road: its gas stations and strip malls, vestiges of prosperity in the form of depleted oil and gas resources in a ruined land. The romance of John Ford’s Westerns has folded up its teepees and the stagecoaches are all gone, but the road is still available and the skies are still wide. This, say the artists, remains the essence of today’s true west, and it has replaced the mythological tropes of the rugged individual—Man—and Nature at their most extraordinary and unforgiving.
Jones makes diorama-like sculptural installations that depict old tires, upended petroleum tanks, and unfinished construction projects to show how our natural history has evolved from the bison of old to the latest generation of behemoths of the Great Plains—semi-trucks convoying commerce between state lines. Shadwell’s monolithic charcoal drawings are effective backdrops for Jones’s nuanced sculptures. Headlights blazing against velvety black, Shadwell’s semi-trailer trucks rule the interstate highway system now as freely and conspicuously as the wooly mammoth roamed the prehistoric continental divide. Almost sinister within the great silence of night, Shadwell’s lonesome giants seem to sense their own demise, as surely imminent as the ultimate fate of Billy the Kid and John Wayne.
Wyoming transplants David Jones and Shelby Shadwell’s exhibition "True West" presents the iconic open road: its gas stations and strip malls, vestiges of prosperity in the form of depleted oil and gas resources in a ruined land. The romance of John Ford’s Westerns has folded up its teepees and the stagecoaches are all gone, but the road is still available and the skies are still wide. This, say the artists, remains the essence of today’s true west, and it has replaced the mythological tropes of the rugged individual—Man—and Nature at their most extraordinary and unforgiving.
Jones makes diorama-like sculptural installations that depict old tires, upended petroleum tanks, and unfinished construction projects to show how our natural history has evolved from the bison of old to the latest generation of behemoths of the Great Plains—semi-trucks convoying commerce between state lines. Shadwell’s monolithic charcoal drawings are effective backdrops for Jones’s nuanced sculptures. Headlights blazing against velvety black, Shadwell’s semi-trailer trucks rule the interstate highway system now as freely and conspicuously as the wooly mammoth roamed the prehistoric continental divide. Almost sinister within the great silence of night, Shadwell’s lonesome giants seem to sense their own demise, as surely imminent as the ultimate fate of Billy the Kid and John Wayne.