No Vacancies At Arts Fort Worth
No Vacancies began with a research visit to the Amon Carter Museum and a print by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait: The Life of a Hunter. "A Tight Fix," 1861. A bear is attacked. A hunter fires. The scene is matter-of-fact about what it depicts. Working from that image, this body of work asks what happens when the problem becomes unsolvable from the inside.
The answer, here, is speculative fiction. No Vacancies imagines an intergalactic intervention: outside forces arriving first as witnesses, then as participants, and finally as a means of escape. The aliens in this work are not tidy saviors. They arrive with the wide-eyed confusion of someone encountering a system they cannot explain. They look at a taxidermy bear in a museum diorama and see a creature made to perform stillness for an audience, forever. They look at the California grizzly on a flag and understand, in the way only an outsider can, that we have made a mascot out of an extinction. They watch. They return. And eventually, they take the bears and leave.
The works in the exhibition draw on appropriated and altered imagery from the Amon Carter's collection alongside original pen and ink drawings with digital intervention, wall vinyl, laser-etched objects, and a bear crankie: a hand-cranked scroll that propels the narrative forward. Together they trace a history of how bears have been hunted, displayed, displaced, and mythologized, and imagine the only honest ending available when the plot has tangled itself past the point of human resolution.
No Vacancies was exhibited at Arts Fort Worth in 2023 and represents an early iteration of an ongoing inquiry into bears as symbols of resilience, conquest, and contested wildness.
The answer, here, is speculative fiction. No Vacancies imagines an intergalactic intervention: outside forces arriving first as witnesses, then as participants, and finally as a means of escape. The aliens in this work are not tidy saviors. They arrive with the wide-eyed confusion of someone encountering a system they cannot explain. They look at a taxidermy bear in a museum diorama and see a creature made to perform stillness for an audience, forever. They look at the California grizzly on a flag and understand, in the way only an outsider can, that we have made a mascot out of an extinction. They watch. They return. And eventually, they take the bears and leave.
The works in the exhibition draw on appropriated and altered imagery from the Amon Carter's collection alongside original pen and ink drawings with digital intervention, wall vinyl, laser-etched objects, and a bear crankie: a hand-cranked scroll that propels the narrative forward. Together they trace a history of how bears have been hunted, displayed, displaced, and mythologized, and imagine the only honest ending available when the plot has tangled itself past the point of human resolution.
No Vacancies was exhibited at Arts Fort Worth in 2023 and represents an early iteration of an ongoing inquiry into bears as symbols of resilience, conquest, and contested wildness.
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Research visit, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, 2020. Works from the permanent collection pulled for study.
Source and Response
Working directly from archival sources, these works trace how bear hunting was documented, celebrated, and mythologized — and what it looks like when something else is watching.
Photograph, unknown photographer From the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth
The Two 2023 Pen and ink with digital intervention 20 x 24 in.
Install Images
