Flaming Star is where cowboys kiss, saddles get ruffled, and bolo ties come undone. It’s where ‘the West’ gets wrangled into wild, unruly terrain. The exhibition borrows its title from Elvis Presley’s 1960 song (and Western film) Flaming Star—a crooning cowboy ballad about masculinity and fate. When the King of glam sang “when I ride, I feel that flaming star,” the lyrics practically begged to be reimagined as a queer anthem of rhinestone-studded fantasy.

The cowboy has long stood as a symbol for rugged masculinity, heroic individualism and white-settler nationalism. But Flaming Star agitates and distorts that myth. Reimagined in the context of Aotearoa, it turns the Marlboro Man into something more camp, more slippery, more speculative. It’s cowboy as drag: unsettling colonial narratives, queering the frontier, and opening space for new kinds of stories to ride through.

Cowboys are hot right now. From Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, to the revival of line dancing, to Hello Kitty’s western-themed pyjama range. But as Flaming Star reminds us, the fantasy of ‘the West’ is seductive, loaded and deeply escapist. This exhibition flips, queers, and reclaims cowboy culture to interrogate dominant hierarchies of gender, race, and power—with camp and desire just beneath the surface, ready to reel you in with a lasso.

In the Dowse’s sultriest saloon are Arapeta Hākura, who takes the ‘rural queer archetype’ by the horns in their Cowboy Motel, where hot cowboys watch over their glittery flock of members. Melbourne-based Bec Agnew unravels spaghetti-western machismo in a stop-motion coming-of-age tale, starring cowboy Barbies adrift in a sea of phalli-cacti. Christopher Ulutupu opens a portal to a parallel cowboy universe in a soap-opera-meets-Ghost-Hunters short film, featuring a mansion haunted by camp, choker-wearing cowboy spirits.

Keri-Mei Zagrobelna imports the visual language of bolo ties and sheriff badges to reckon with the ongoing colonial violence faced by Indigenous peoples. Ngāti Porou cowgirl Melanie Tangaere Baldwin is the harbinger of emo-country in her ode to the one and only Patsy Cline. Michael Haggie yearns for the movie stars of cowboy westerns, gathering and resurrecting them in a new fantasy world on a celebratory outing. Ming Ranginui pimps the ride for the skuxxest cowboys with silky rhinestone saddles. And Sandy Gibbs breaks down and problematises masculinity, gender, and performance with her cowboys saddled on gyrating mechanical bulls — but be careful, you might just leave with a wet patch on your pants.

Flaming Star rides roughshod over colonial myth and macho cliché. So, saddle up as you ride into the new cowboy capital. Just don’t expect a smooth ride.

^{Still from Christopher Ulutupu, Sisifo, 2024. Courtesy of Jhana Millers Gallery.}