Artist Statement
This series combines the history and tradition of horse portraiture (such as was practices by George Stubbs and others) in which animals were depicted for the prestige and pleasure they brought their owners, with several other cultural touchstones. The title is a mash-up of three culturally resonant fables: My Little Pony, Hasbro’s toy line and media franchise which telegraphs utopian girlhood using toy ponies as avatars (and which I rather appreciate); the 1992 Cormac McCarthy novel (and 2000 Billy Bob Thornton movie) All the Pretty Horses, which is an example of a classic romantic American Western fable, and the section of Revelations that describes the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Each horse in the series is titled, as though the animal was named, with the chemical name of a common plastic, materials which are iconic of both industrial abundance and environmental devastation—essential to, and ultimately destructive of, modern life.