The Gunsmoke Circus is a body of mixed media paintings that draws on iconic Western imagery and ephemera from film, packaging, and magazines. Built through an intensive process of layering paint, paper, and printed fragments, the work places a strong emphasis on texture, composition, and surface — creating its own sense of visual history within each painting.
The title was drawn from a story out of a 1953 issue of Famous Western magazine and is intended to reflect the unpredictable and theatrical nature of the Western. These paintings reconstruct those fragments, presenting the West as both memory and performance. This is the spectacle of the frontier as it was imagined through popular culture: a place where anything could happen at any moment — often ending in a hail of bullets and a cloud of gunsmoke.
