Roadrunner/Coyote

The cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with a slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.

He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely! — so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful.”  

                           — From Mark Twain’s Roughing It, attributed as the source of Wile E. Coyote’s character.

For a long time, my work has settled around themes of grieving, loneliness, childhood, and mental health, of finding a home in yourself and in the world. While working with scenes from Looney Tunes, I found myself repeatedly drawn to the vast, beautifully vivid landscapes of Roadrunner and Coyote. They were the (artificial) landscapes and colors of my childhood, and like so many children of the last eighty years, I ate pizza and drank Coca-Cola and stared into the TV set across scrubland and prairie, bright imagined canyons and sweeping yellow skies, watching the increasingly inventive, foolhardy attempts by Coyote to catch the Roadrunner, who becomes almost a bystander to Coyote’s obsessive plans. Now, as an adult, I have found so much more familiarity in these stories than I expected. In the immense, unchanging backdrops of the American West, the unfathomable scale and age of the scene merely offer us a stage for Coyote’s trials. Wile E. has become my mascot for isolation, for loneliness and self-sabotage. I felt the weight of his hard work, his lack of a friend; I found a home for myself in his scruffy body and folded back ears. The Roadrunner/Coyote sweater allows the wearer to choose an incarnation for themselves, to choose to assume either the form of the lonely, hungry Coyote, or the graceful, invulnerable Roadrunner.