In Strange Love, Chavis Mármol examines how ideas of power, masculinity, and control are performed and reinforced through familiar images of American culture. The cowboy, the weapon, and the machine each carry associations with strength, independence, and dominance, but also reveal an underlying need to continually demonstrate those qualities. Developed in response to Texas’s cultural landscape, the exhibition brings these symbols together through humor and exaggeration, drawing connections between rodeo culture, military power, technological ambition, and entertainment.
At the center of the installation, a mechanical rocket built from a mechanical bull’s mechanism brings the language of rodeo entertainment into direct contact with the imagery of military and aerospace technology. References to cowboy culture continue throughout the gallery, while a large billboard incorporates imagery from the 1959 book Man’s Reach Into Space. Together, these elements connect the mythology of the American West with the pursuit of technological advancement and expansion. In Texas, where cowboy imagery remains a powerful part of the state’s identity, aerospace, defense, and technology industries offer a contemporary expression of many of the same ideas surrounding progress, conquest, and power.
The exhibition’s title references Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which uses satire to confront Cold War paranoia and the threat of nuclear destruction. Mármol similarly uses humor to expose contradictions within objects and images that can appear ordinary, entertaining, or even desirable. Throughout the work, masculinity becomes another form of performance, where potency and control must continually be demonstrated even as vulnerability remains present beneath them. By moving between the playful and the threatening, Strange Love considers how spectacle can make systems of violence and power familiar, and how easily symbols of domination can be transformed into entertainment.
– Rhys Munro, Residencies and Exhibitions Manager
