Hmm.. It would seem I’m having a thing for books and cowboys this week. Let’s just go with it, ‘kay? I had a different artist planned for today, but sometimes, I’m just not feeling it, so I go into my Pinterest archives to see what might strike my fancy a little, um, fancier. And these sewn sculptures by Lisa Kokin got me excited.
The artist has taken old pulp cowboy novels and transformed them into organic branches and beings. Cowboy culture has been such a prominent and accepted part of American history, pop culture elevating the cowboy as hero throughout the mid-twentieth century, it isn’t any wonder the gun totin’ good-guy mentality has permeated the minds of so many. Kokin is taking a stereotypically male culture and fusing it with a stereotypical female craft by taking apart these books and sewing them together. It is interesting to think of the young boys who once held these books and played the cowboy role. Have their lives transformed? Or are they still playing cowboy?
To see more of the work of Lisa Kokin, please visit her website. Lisa’s work can currently be seen in Women’s Work at Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, CA through March 30th.
Images via the artist’s website.
