My work traffics heavily in material symbolism. I make sculptures which combine traditional woodworking methods, digital fabrication and found objects with video and animation to explore the myths of the Manifest Destiny and the Wild West. I make physical objects that embody not only my deep ambivalence around my familial history but also my personal attraction to and rejection of American mythology. Enigmatic and corporeal, these objects hover between the spaces of architecture and sculpture; put otherwise, they oscillate between functional, performative, and static states, seeking to tackle the ego of American culture with both humor and rigor. Through woodworking, digital modeling, found objects, performance, drawing and conceptual building, I complicate and call into question multiple narratives of cosmology, ownership, and frontiers.

This film assembles itself from a library of footage from home movies from a ranch on the Wyoming/Idaho boarder and pairs them with a script generated from an AI trained on pulp western novels and the exit interviews from the Heavens Gate cult. This film is an evolving document, and continues to change every time it is screened. Sample captured late 2022

Alex Schechter