WHY IS THE SKY SO BLUE?

SOLO SHOWPIRATE CONTEMPORARY

SEPT-OCT 2024

INCLUDED WORKS:

SHOTGUN WEDDING

2024, 195.5” x 24.25”, oil on canvas

COWGIRL, REVERSED

2024, 67.56” x 96.25”, oil on canvas

I’M NOT LOOKING TO BE TIED DOWN

2024, interactive installation, lariats, work gloves, and dirt from my childhood home

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND

2024, short film, 27:52

THIS LAND IS MY LAND

2024, sculpture, dirt, rocks, reclaimed fencepost and pots, wire

BIG GUY BY THE FOURTH OF JULY

2023, 36” x 36”, oil on canvas

MILK MAID

2022, 30” x 40”, oil on canvas

COCKFARMER

2022, 24” x 30”, oil on canvas

TROPHY WIFE

2021, 30” x 48”, oil on canvas
INSTALLER: WYATT SCOTT
PHOTOS: WES MAGYAR

SHOW STATEMENT

In “Why is the Sky So Blue?”, Kimberly Faber turns her observation- and research-based practice on the region of her birth. Large format oil paintings, sculptures, and a short film examine the consequences of adhering to the Western myth, while also re-imagining and challenging those fictions to which the region adheres, all whilst contemplating geographic identity and what it means to be “from” a place. Exploring themes of power, nourishment, and agency/ownership, while preoccupied with the disparate contexts through which we view men and women, “Why is the Sky So Blue?” presents an American West that is equally contrived, and therefore equally possible.

New paintings, a short film, sculptures, and an installation subvert idioms that have been adopted by rural America as a tool to perpetuate and preserve the myth of the American West—i.e. barefoot and pregnant, ball and chain, shotgun wedding; idioms that are commonly misattributed to the region despite originating in England and on the American Eastern Coast (and often with different meanings than colloquially understood today).