Drawing from a fleeting moment in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), Julian Whatley reimagines the character of “Chihuahua” not as sidekick or subplot but as subject. Painted in a style reminiscent of Goya’s Black Paintings—with their rough surfaces, moody chiaroscuro, and psychological saturation—this work destabilizes the Western genre’s gendered framing.

The saloon girl, once relegated to backdrop or casualty, becomes here a spectral presence: poised between longing and knowing. By engaging cinematic nostalgia through painterly abstraction, Whatley performs an aesthetic shift—what his Peripheral Space project calls an opening of portals. Portals not just to alternative histories, but to hidden emotional truths buried beneath the myth of the American West.

This is not the West of manifest destiny or heroic frontier justice. It’s the West of spectral women, of deferred dreams, of laboring bodies and emotional residue—rendered here with reverence, rupture, and restraint.