Chloe West’s latest solo exhibition, Games of Chance at HARPER’S, captures an uncanny sense of duality within the American West — where hyperrealistic detail collides with mystical allegory. Raised in Wyoming, West threads the stark clarity of Dutch Golden Age portraiture into the rugged textures of mountain ranges, desert expanses, and high-altitude skies. Her self-portraits and still lifes evoke an introspective reckoning, reconfiguring the visual language of the frontier with elements that are both symbolic and deeply personal. With each canvas, West creates a mythos where thorns, knives, and animal remains are as much about beauty as they are about survival and storytelling.
In Cowboy Philosopher, she stages a meditation on knowledge and identity, conjuring echoes of 17th-century Flemish compositions while seated beside a mountain lion skull. The oil painting recalls the aesthetics of Salomon Koninck but replaces scholarly quietude with psychological intensity. The artist gazes out from a cosmic tapestry-covered table, challenging enduring constructs around gender and regional identity. This tension — between traditional cowboy mythology and its more intimate, haunted reinterpretation — emerges in recurring motifs: skulls that whisper of mortality, fabrics that veil and reveal, and weapons that seem poised between defense and symbolism.
West reclaims the West as a place not only of conquest but of contemplation, where female subjectivity is central and cultural narratives are ripe for reinvention. Her work doesn’t just reference magical realism; it breathes it. By weaving together personal experience, classical iconography, and the metaphysical, she distills the vastness of American myth into scenes that are both grounded and otherworldly. Through her visionary lens, the land becomes both memory and metaphor, echoing with histories retold and futures reimagined.
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in Bahia. 