The Panavisions are all framed in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio of panoramic movie frames. The wide format is suited to a genre preoccupied with open landscapes, long views, and the space between moral and amoral combatants.

The compositions are all digital collage, combining multiple image fragments from a wide range of Spaghetti Westerns, both famous and obscure, and text or graphic sources that offer some inflection on the narrative ideas latent in the imagery.

Much of the text is taken from a 1930’s manual for Engilsh speakers called ‘Teach Yourself Arabic.’ The author, a British foreign service officer with experience in Afghanistan, provides parallel translations which in fragmentary form provide an eerily poetic and contemporary gloss on the possibilities of the narrative. The text in this image reads: “I travelled with a man whose character was good… A great liar”

The parallel Arabic script provides a calligraphic and gestural element that interacts with representational parts of the image, such as the legs of running horses.

“I passed a snake…” “I met a man to whom good and evil are alike…” “Enough.” Certain sounds and the idea of the snakes forked tongue inform this encounter in a wasteland.

Some images in the series abandon a strictly horizontal movie frame for a vertical composition. In this image a long discussion of Arabic sounds that challenge the English palate fades down to earth where a rider lookes over his shoulder at another.

Scale shift is an important compositional element of these works. The text and graphic imagery is hard-edged black, woodcut or lead type. The representational imagery is all from low-quality video images that don’t naturally hold up to high enlargement in the large-scale final print. The pixels of the low-resolution video collage are hard and square, but have been turned on their corners so that, at close range, they resemble a visually lively mosaic rather than the dead grid of technological modernism.

This series began in 1998, before the 2001 World Trade Center attack spawned a new Renaissance of xenophobic mania in this country. But the series was motivated by the underlying tension between US and Western European culture and Islam, sometimes sublimated on the very same landscape, as in the Spaghetti Westerns’ locations in southern Spain.

The introduction of Renaissance woodcut graphics to the image in this case alludes to the apocalyptic undertones of cultural conflict and to the narrative conceits of B-Movie Euro-Westerns. The graphic here is from Albrecht Durer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The table of ordinal numbers, divided by gender, implicitly refers to the four distant riders at the bottom of the canyon, moving slowly closer to their destination.