Clare Stimpson

Cowboys and Aliens is a documentation of human magnetism towards the final frontier, the American West, from the perspective of a modern settler.

In 2018, I left my home on the East coast and began a migration westward. This journey felt like walking into a new world I had only known through television and movies, history books, and music. Reconciling my expectations with reality I photograph from the exterior of the scene, merely acting as an observer, a silent experience-er, like an alien watching from high above our atmosphere.

Historically, those before me traveling west were validated by the ideals of Manifest Destiny, but this landscape is not our land, not to be owned but acknowledged and allowed the space to breathe, grow, and change. We are visitors to this landscape, as alien as the extraterrestrials that visit this land and have become ingrained within Western Americana culture.

We are a culture of explorers, both westward and onward and upward; we are all just cowboys and aliens.