Exhibit by Hazer

Unmistakably Western is a show about larger-than-life cowgirls, all hat, boots, style, and attitude.

Lobby Gallery
September 11 – November 21, 2026

Reception

Opening reception during the Emerson Art Walk on Friday, September 11th from 5:00-9:00pm.

Artist Statement

I start with my studio photographs, then use paint to push the images even further. In select works, I incorporate my Montana street photographs into the background, placing cowboys and hippies side by side on the same piece of art. It’s unmistakably Western, but it’s far from traditional.  

Artist Bio

I grew up in Twin Bridges, Montana, a town of fewer than 300 people, where my family has lived for five generations. It’s surrounded by ranches, some of them owned by billionaires, and those same ranches provide a good living for a lot of people in town. That contradiction feels normal to me because it is normal. Cowboys, ranchers, rodeos, work clothes, bad signage, powerful women in cowboy hats. None of it feels exotic. It’s just the visual language I grew up with. We didn’t swim in pools. We played in ponds, fields and irrigation ditches.

I picked up a camera in my late teens, originally to capture my own reference images for photorealistic painting. Then photography took over for more than fifteen years. I ran wild. I photographed Montana from its landscapes and small-town streets to the heavy industry that keeps the heart of it moving, along with the people, and entertainment. The artists I met from Butte to the Bitterroot, Bozeman, and Billings. Those where I drew my inspiration. Montana is brimming with amazing creative minds.



At some point my professional camera had started feeling like it was getting between me and the people I wanted to photograph downtown, so I started carrying a little toy receipt-printer camera instead and it changed everything. I could make a portrait, hand somebody a physical photograph thirty seconds later, say have a great day, and keep moving. Those receipts kept stacking up. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny moments that brought a surprising amount of joy each time I handed one over. It became one of my favorite daily rituals. 

Somewhere in that process I came back to painting because there were limitations to what I could show simply using a camera.

Photography is subtractive by nature. You point the camera at the world and decide what gets left inside the frame. Painting lets me take that even further. I can keep cutting until the subject becomes everything.

Now I find myself looking for the extremes. I’m drawn to contemporary Western fashion pushed almost to the point of fantasy, but I’m just as interested in the completely candid moments like a cowgirl at a local rodeo holding her new puppy, or a downtown chef during his break while I’m walking one of the back alleys. The things that only happen when nobody is trying to turn a moment into a commercial. Both are the West I walk through every day.

That’s where the cowgirls came from. I wanted to create something I enjoyed living on my own wall. Something I’m not seeing in the Western galleries. Larger than life, bold, powerful, and packed with attitude. I’m not particularly interested in painting every buckle, eyelash, or piece of fringe correctly. I’m interested in how much I can remove and still have it connect with someone instantly. In some of the paintings, the receipt portraits come back as the backdrop, pulling real people I’ve photographed into these much larger Western icons. 

I’m not trying to recreate an older version of the West. I live here, I grew up here. I’ve photographed it my entire career. I see the West through different eyes. I wanted to create art that was unmistakably Western, but let me play outside the traditional boundaries.