Rhinestone-studded fantasies at the Dowse Art Museum
Tuesday, 22 July 2025
Milly Mitchell-Anyon is a curator at The Dowse Art Museum
It seems like everywhere you look right now, there are cowboys.
From Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Hello Kitty’s western-themed pyjama range, to the sudden resurgence of line dancing or even Kmart’s range of cow print denim. It feels like an unstoppable force. The cowboy is having a moment.
The Dowse Art Museum’s latest exhibition, Flaming Star, reimagines and dismantles the cowboy. Bringing together eight contemporary artists from Aotearoa to flip, queer, and reclaim cowboy culture by interrogating dominant hierarchies of gender, race, and power. Flaming Star is an exhibition where cowboys kiss, saddles get ruffled, and bolo ties come undone.
The cowboy has long stood as a symbol for rugged masculinity, heroic individualism and white-settler nationalism. This is where Wellington-based artist Sandy Gibbs flips this script with her fetishistic, fluid and elusive moving image work ‒ where the undulating hips of cowboys conjure the ghost of a mechanical bull, or perhaps something even more intimate. Exposing the cowboy as pure performance.
‘The West’ gets wrangled into wild, unruly terrain in Bec Agnew’s stop-motion coming-of-age tale as she takes on the machismo of the popular spaghetti-western. Like a surreal fever dream, her work features all the tropes of a Western but beneath the humour lies something thornier: a sharp critique of how consumerism, sexuality and power intersect in contemporary society.
Flaming Star turns the Marlboro Man into something more camp, more slippery, more speculative. In the exhibition, Michael Haggie assembles a posse of cowboys in his drawings and paintings. His work becomes a place where cowboys tenderly kiss, play, and ride bareback. These queer visions are pieced together in a matrix ‒ where Brokeback meets BDSM, and desire is centre stage.
Moving image artist Christopher Ulutupu opens a portal to a parallel cowboy universe in his soap-opera-meets-Ghost-Hunters film ‒ that haunts you in the best kind of way. It’s where queer cowboys in crop tops, chokers and a lot of fringe frolic in fields, where fantasy and desire meet in the same frame.
The exhibition is a wild ride through rhinestone dreams, satin fantasies, and the rich terrain of identity, desire and memory. Like Arapeta Hākura’s installation in Flaming Star which transforms into a sanctuary ‒ where takatāpui kin shimmer in gold as they watch over the space, where ceramic horse penises tell stories erased by museums, and the cowboy becomes a symbol of reclamation, resistance, power and joy.
But Flaming Star also is a reminder that the fantasy of ‘The West’ is seductive, loaded and deeply escapist. Jeweller Keri-Mei Zagrobelna unsettles colonial narratives associated with the frontier by reclaiming and retooling the visual language of ‘The West’ in her series of bolo ties. Zagrobelna speaks directly to an indigenous experience of the oft-celebrated legacy of the cowboy by re-appropriating the bolo tie as a symbol of resistance and questioning the dominant narratives told.
Agitating this idea is Ming Ranginui, whose sculptural saddles are Trojan horses of critique and cultural resistance, hidden beneath ruched labial folds of satin and twinkling rhinestones. They’re fully loaded objects, gliding deftly between te ao Māori and te ao Pākehā. Her work riffs on cowboys, craft and costume to conjure an aesthetic of refusal, where glamour dismantles colonial narratives and transformation rides in, sequinned and bareback.
Cowboys and country music go hand-in-hand, but it carries its own baggage, often excluding people of colour ‒ think Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ being removed from the Billboard country charts for not being ‘country’ enough. Melanie Tangaere Baldwin’s mirrored portrait of herself as Patsy Cline is an ode to country music. With its heartbreak, grit and big feelings ‒ country music is like the original emo music, where grief and tragedy are channelled into song. Tangaere Baldwin takes back and occupies that space.
The exhibition itself borrows its title from Elvis Presley’s 1960 song (and Western film) Flaming Star ‒ a crooning cowboy ballad about masculinity and fate. When the King of glam sang “when I ride, I feel that flaming star,” the lyrics practically begged to be reimagined as a queer anthem of rhinestone-studded fantasy. It should give you a clear idea of what you might encounter when you visit The Dowse Art Museum to see Flaming Star.
So, saddle up for a wild ride.
On until 9 November 2025