The cowboy has been presented as the solitary hero in a monolith of stories. Early American frontier painters showed cowboys enduring spectacular aloneness within divine landscapes. Indigenous people, in those paintings, were often shown as accessories to the ordained wilderness. Women were rarely seen at all. The cowboy was centered in landscape, in painting, and in American culture. The one place within American legends where the cowboy was absent was the home. The hero of the American west, the grand individual, exists in opposition to being a partner or a parent. The labor of existing within a home falls onto a different character, who often endures a private task of aloneness, unconsecrated and without accolades.  

Dreaming of a Perfect Aloneness is devoted to grasping at a beloved home through fantasies of an impossibly griefless autonomy.  Motherhood, both fulfilling and lonely, comes without the respite of aloneness. This project marries two worlds, the domestic frontier and the mythic Wild West, in search of the elusive freedom and sustained aloneness that only cowboys seem to be painted into. I've labored at the futile task of making a home for a cowboy. I dream of being a cowgirl instead.