A lady in a light-grey Victorian dress, with delicate floral pattern and a dark hat, is seated on a golden pillow staring into the background, a dark canyon under a...
A lady in a light-grey Victorian dress, with delicate floral pattern and a dark hat, is seated on a golden pillow staring into the background, a dark canyon under a bright orange sky. In one hand she is clutching a rifle, but not just any rifle: the infamous 1873 Winchester Rifle, ‘the Gun that won the West’. The widow of the founder of the Winchester Rifle Company, Sara Winchester, kept building and expanding her house in the belief that she could so escape the vengeful ghosts of all the men killed by the very rifles that built her fortune.
Upon closer inspection the golden pillow reveals itself to be a very obese golden calf, the proverbial false idol against which the Bible warns.
Here the most fundamental of American myth, the story of building a fortune through your own volition, if necessary, at all costs, is combined with a biblical story about the lure of the very narratives that alienate us from ourselves, pulling us onto a path that leads us to loose ourselves.
