Peter Adamyan's "Maiming the West"

Currently on view at Spoke Art Gallery in San Francisco is artist Peter Adamyan’s poignant solo exhibition, “Maiming the West.”

The multi-disciplinary artist tells “the story of manifest destiny in post civil war America and the failures of reconstruction in the south. Exploring the way in which loggers, miners, railroad workers, farmers, ranchers and tycoons “tamed” the land in an effort to profit from it, leaving destruction, genocide and extinction in their wake.”

Also inspired by the increased access to national parks and the mistreatment of wild places, “many of these places have become nothing more than tourist attractions no better than amusement parks leading to what many have called the Disney-fication of the national parks, with social media leading to the parks being loved to death, showing that even the land that is set aside to be wild and free has become valued by how it can turn a profit. With these thoughts I set out to create a body of work teetering on an uneasy beauty between the wild natural lands that abound west of the Mississippi with the always present hand of man willing to destroy it for an ever increasing fortune.”

The exhibition will be on view until July 6th, 2019.  Take a look at the work below: