A glittering red lasso arcs through the hallway like a visual overture, luring visitors toward Invie’s hybrid world of fashion, fantasy, and social commentary.

Chatting with Scout Invie in her official capacity at Modern West, where for a time she performed such invaluable services as putting visitors in touch with the artists whose works were on display, was always a pleasure and a learning experience. Not only did she know her subjects, but she never hijacked the conversation to talk about her own work. Consequently, her recent emergence, including a current show at Ogden Contemporary Arts, came as something of an original discovery.

Conversion rather than original construction is an almost ironclad rule in art galleries, and not just in smaller venues that were retrofitted from a storefront or home. The Louvre, the largest arts museum in the world, almost certainly began as a hunting lodge across the river from the island town of Paris, became a fortress, then a palace, and lastly the home of Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo. One of the pleasures for history buffs visiting them is seeing how palace courtyards and promenades were converted into spaces to show art. On the other hand, it’s also satisfying to see how some of Salt Lake’s purpose-built galleries, like Finch Lane, were made to look like they had been homes, complete with fireplace.

Our latest local transformation belongs to OCA, whose exhibition spaces must have posed a challenge when the original, generic commercial interior was repurposed, resulting in an enormous front room and the more intimate—if labyrinthine—upstairs space in back. In years past, such matters might have been regarded as less than challenging, but in this age of installation as an art form in itself, the artist’s work doesn’t end with the frame or the pedestal. Rather, in collaboration with curators and gallerists, artists often forge a unique statement that will never be repeated, and everyone including the audience is implicated in how and what it communicates.

A floating cowboy hat, fashioned from painted canvas hovers like a cartoon thought bubble—full of pattern, punch, and parodied projection.

Scout Invie’s No Place Like Home occupies the upper rooms, which makes a good deal of sense given the human scale of her work. While she’s worked with video and some well-received performances—she’s the one behind the dancers patiently coiling yarn or knitting, perhaps thereby offering an alternative bridge between time and space—the primary constant in her art is textiles. In No Place Like Home, this means sewn articles of Western-style clothing like vests, chaps, boots, gloves and hats. Thematically, she prefers foregrounding places where opposites meet, which in this case means that working duds that were invented to protect working cowboys from the hazards of both their labor and its location encounter clothing as ornamental costume that signifies the wearer’s role: often a theatrical one.

Scout Invie, “What Is Your Obsession with Cowboys?”

This border may be most visible in Invie’s chaps. Named after the Spanish for a dwarf evergreen oak, the thorny branches of which would otherwise shred the trousers of a person on horseback, chaps become the quintessential example of her use of canvas and acrylic paint to forge clothing that makes not only a stylistic point, but a verbal one as well. In fact, it soon becomes apparent that the “home” referred to in her title is Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she was born and spent her first decade surrounded by wealth and people indulging in a sentimental view of the historical West, and in particular the fictitious image of the Cowboy as a colorful, even operatically musical figure, with no trace of hard, dirty work visible on his elaborately ornamented clothing.

What’s visible on Invie’s chaps, seen close up, are headlines from news stories about the Western experience of today, from sky-high property values to the threat of Covid-19. These, combined with the extreme exaggeration of the costume attire, confirm the unreality of the cowboy image at the same time as they point up the pleasure still to be had in make-believe—so long as some sense of reality remains. Indeed, at the opening of No Place, Invie, who appeared as herself, an artist dressed for a professional event, nevertheless enjoyed pirouetting and posing playfully for her fans among the various outfits on display.

Speaking of which, the clothing appeared “in person” on headless dress dummies that wore only the vests and chaps, while the hats hung from the ceiling and floated above the heads of the audience and the boots stood on pedestals as if in a store. The dummies appeared randomly distributed around the space, which had the effect of presenting a typical commercial experience crossed with the experience of walking among an “authentic” troupe of rhinestone cowpokes.

Invie also has an elaborate presence on the web, including Instagram, and her graphic skills spilled over onto sign- or poster-like versions mounted on the walls, along with a pair of ornamental toy six-shooters, the originals of the ones that she often displays in the photos. Her presence at the opening as the straight version of the character she played in these images may have helped her audience to invert the process, for example standing next to the dummies so their heads took the place of those missing from the display. At times, the floating hats seemed about to slip onto heads passing by. The two upper rooms are separated by a hallway, in which a suspended, bright red lariat seemed ready to lasso viewers and lead them to a distant light box on which further graphics danced.

Sometimes an exhibition gives a sense that, if this is all the artist can do, it’s enough for a good life. With Scout Invie, the feeling is more that the past is merely prologue. It’s almost certain she’ll be back soon, possibly with something that seems unprecedented, but in any case, something worth the wait.

No Place Like Home, Ogden Contemporary Arts, Ogden, through July 13.

All images courtesy of the artist.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.