In 2018, Bruce Rowley robbed his local bank in Ansonia, a small town in Connecticut, and then proceeded to drive over 8 hours, crossing state-lines through Massachusetts and Vermont, to end up throwing the stolen cash into Taylor Swift’s back garden.
The work is a visually ambitious, formally bold, genre-bending, re-imagining of the Western anti-hero, blending the frontier with the present through reenactment, live camera and dioramas.
Here, the storyteller invites the audience to recast Bruce as a frontiersman in the landscapes of the Wild West, camped out by the Colorado River or sheltering under the shade of some tree in the middle of the desert. Inspired by old spaghetti westerns, society’s myopic obsession with celebrity and stories propagated by America’s cultural hegemony, this work explores issues surrounding masculinity, fame, power and the stories we tell ourselves.
Together the storyteller and audience will stage Bruce’s fantasy, exploring the notoriety his actions afforded him and the reasons he did them.
The story will be told in-part by Bruce himself, who over the past few years I have developed a relationship with. Now finished his probation and returned to formal education, his involvement raises complex ethical considerations of representation and how complicit the storyteller is in reinforcing the subject’s version of events, in the quest to represent the larger social issues at play.
Thank you for allowing artists to take creative risks, the world needs it now more than ever.
Programmed artist
