overview
Dillo Day is Northwestern University’s annual student-run music festival and the largest of its kind in the country. The theme for Dillo Day 2022 was Return of the Rodeo, a grand celebration of the festival's 50th anniversary and a nod to the Texas roots of its founders. As a native Texan myself (tips cowboy hat), the theme immediately resonated with me. I applied as a student artist for the Dillo Day art installation and was thrilled to be selected to bring my own interpretation of Return of the Rodeo to life.
ideation
There were many reasons why I applied for this Dillo Day’s art installation, but the main one was the theme: Return of the Rodeo. Growing up in Houston, I attended the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo nearly every year. It was such a normal part of my life that I never really considered the fact that not every state has a rodeo! It wasn’t until I got to college — where I met people from all over the country and the world — that I realized how unique growing up in Texas was, and how unfamiliar the concept of a rodeo was to many people.
Thus, for the art installation, I wanted to create something that celebrated the 50th anniversary of Dillo Day as well as highlighted the things I loved most about Texas. I began by listing things that, to me, made Texas uniquely, Texas.
I also looked to the description of Return of the Rodeo given by Mayfest Productions, the student org that plans and produces the festival:
"Return of the Rodeo is a grand celebration of the past through a contemporary lens. It pulls from the archives to launch our history into the future, merging tradition and innovation: the classic rodeo with the modern music festival. A revitalization of rodeo as we know it, our interpretation captures the electric and vivacious energy of a rodeo and translates it into our color scheme and design. Bold yellows, blues, oranges, and pinks jump out in front of dark, muted backgrounds. Gradients and noise breathe new life into vintage iconography. It's the Return of the Rodeo."
-Mayfest Productions
I was drawn to the tension between the classic and the modern. I wanted to create something that blended the imagery of a traditional rodeo with the energy of a modern music festival, highlighting the contrast between past and present while reimagining them side by side.
construction
I ultimately decided on constructing an image of Texas within a computer monitor. After dealing with a few suspicious sellers on Facebook Marketplace (special shoutout to my friend Cat for driving me around), I obtained an Apple Macintosh, a Micron keyboard, and a Microsoft mouse. I initially wanted to hollow out the monitor but keep leave glass screen intact. That proved harder than expected, so I removed the glass screen along with everything else, leaving just the shell of the monitor.
The next step was to construct the scene within the monitor. I knew I wanted a cowboy to be the center of the scene surrounded by various cacti and rocks. Using air-dry clay and wooden chopsticks, I molded the clay around wooden skeletons. I also recycled styrofoam I already had as the floor of the scene and covering it with a layer of mixed colored clay for that marble effect.
For the keyboard, I removed individual keys and painted over them with acrylic paint before spelling out 'Return of Dillo 50'. I made sure to use 'bold yellows, blues, oranges, and pinks' that contrasted the more muted color of the original keyboard.
deconstruction
Something I didn't account for was the weather. I wasn't expecting it to be so rainy on the actual day of the festival, so by the time I set up my piece for the outdoor art installation, the air-dry clay had rehydrated and began to melt. Sometime during the actual music festival, some drunk dude smashed my sculpture :( . With the roof of the monitor gone, more and more rain got into the sculpture, exacerbating the melting.
By the time I came back to pick up my piece the following week, my dear cowboy and horse along with the cacti have succumbed to Mother Nature. Surprisingly, the keyboard and mouse stayed intact, so I took those home with me. They currently reside on my shelf :) .
Through it's deconstruction/destruction, Return of the Rodeo becomes a fragment of the past. At the same time, it maintains its existence in the present in other ways — in pictures and memories.
reflection
So, what does Return of the Rodeo mean? Is it summoning the past to the present, or bringing the present to the past? And what, really, distinguishes the two?
I hope Return of the Rodeo can evoke different interpretations depending on one's perspective. It could signify a nostalgic revival of past traditions and experiences, bringing elements of the past into the present. But it could also suggest a modern reinterpretation of history, where contemporary culture reshapes and reimagines what came before.
Time is complex! The boundary between past and present is rarely clear and often subject to individual experiences and memories as well as collective cultural contexts. What we now see as classic or vintage was once contemporary, perhaps even futuristic. Even the phrase 'Return of the Rodeo' implies that the rodeo belongs to the past. And in some ways, to some people, it does. After all, the rodeo today already looks very different from the rodeos of the past, and it will undoubtedly continue to evolve in the decades and centuries to come.
In this sense, Return of the Rodeo reflects the cyclical nature of time, where the past continually resurfaces in the present and the present reshapes how we understand the past — where time stops, and flows again.
