Dave Smith | Warriors and Braves (2000)
Acrylic on printed fabric | 48 x 24 inches
In Warriors and Braves, Dave Smith executes a biting critique of how the American West has been sanitized and packaged into a series of cheap, accessible thrills for the casual observer. Painted on heavy vintage curtain fabric—a material originally destined for a child’s bedroom—the work forces an immediate confrontation with the "playtime" version of history we’ve been fed for generations. As a curator and artist, you can feel the material weight of this choice; Smith hasn't just painted on a surface, he has occupied a piece of domestic kitsch that was designed to teach the "myth" of the frontier to the next generation. His process is one of surgical removal and calculated replacement. By meticulously painting out the original cowboy figures from the fabric’s repeating pattern, he leaves the Native American leaders floating in a clinical blue void. This act of isolation is a powerful metaphor for the Great Expansion’s attempt to "domesticate" indigenous history—stripping it of its context and moving it indoors to serve as a backdrop for suburban childhood. The transition from his initial physical collages to this 48-inch textile support allows Smith to play with the literal "fabric" of our identity, suggesting that our understanding of the West is as manufactured and mass-produced as the curtains in a nursery.
The composition functions like a vertical display rack in a roadside gift shop. The 48-inch span is crowded with the disembodied "charms" of a consumer-driven frontier: hyper-realistic keychains of a beaded doll, a revolver, and a silver tomahawk. These objects represent the "perfect fit" of a history that has been successfully rebranded as a souvenir. By floating these trinkets alongside realistically rendered pickup trucks and motorhomes, Smith highlights the modern traveler’s demand for a sanitized experience. The RVs act as mobile fortresses of suburban entitlement, allowing the observer to traverse the high-contrast "red rock" terrain while remaining safely tucked behind a pane of glass and the hum of an air-conditioner.
There is a gritty irony in the execution. The jagged mountain range doesn't feel like nature; it feels like a plywood cutout for a theme park. Smith is asking us to recognize that our current "pioneer" spirit is mostly performed through the things we buy—the keychains, the trucks, and the domestic comforts we drag into the desert. He’s showing us a landscape where the sacred has been flattened into a domestic pattern, and the violent history of the West has been reduced to something you can hang on a set of car keys.
Warriors and Braves is a quintessential strike in the Neo-Pop Surrealism movement, leaning heavily into the Pictures Generation's obsession with how we consume images. The isolation of the "keychain" icons against the flat, graphic mountain range invokes the product-focused legacy of Andy Warhol, treating these violent symbols with the same clinical, commercial detachment Warhol applied to a soup can or a celebrity's face.
While the work shares the "deadpan" Western horizontal gaze of Ed Ruscha, Smith’s use of verticality and found textile places it closer to the material subversions of Sigmar Polke. Instead of seeking "pure" abstraction, Smith uses the graphic flatness of the composition to highlight the commercial branding of the wilderness. He isn't interested in the landscape as a spiritual space, but as a contested stage—a place where the grandeur of history is constantly being overwritten by the mass-produced artifacts of the weekend traveler.
Curatorial Recommendation: This is a commanding, vertical work that offers immense wall power and a high level of conceptual grit. For a collection exploring the commodification of the American West or the subversion of domestic materials, this is an essential entry. It challenges the viewer to look past the "souvenir" and recognize the real-world displacement that those objects represent.