Inspired by recurring trips to an almost-ghost town in Texas, Hannah Spector makes haunting multimedia installations.
Austin, Texas / hannahspector.com / @hanlalalalalala
Blink and you’ll miss it. The almost-ghost town of Valentine, Texas, is a blip on the West Texas map—known primarily as the site of art duo Elmgreen and Dragset’s iconic Prada Marfa (2005) installation along Route 90. But it’s much more significant for interdisciplinary Austin-based artist Hannah Spector (they/them), who has been making extended voyages to the semi-abandoned railroad town since 2020. It is there that the artist has created their most recent body of work, a culmination of drawings, intaglio prints, poetry, video, sound, and ceramics.
In their 2025 exhibition at Women & Their Work in Austin, titled if you stare at a cowboy’s face for long enough, it turns into a sunset, a seven-channel sound and video installation transformed the gallery space into an immersive desert environment. In the work, each screen features dreamy, meditative recordings from West Texas: plants swaying in the breeze, a figure using a leaf blower to gently move a tumbleweed, the interior of a dilapidated building, a train passing by. They’re accompanied by another gallery wall organized into a gridded constellation of whimsical ceramic and mahogany sculptures adjacent to surreal, wall-mounted copper plate etchings depicting dysmorphic bodies.
Enchanted with the wise and vast desert landscape, Spector seeks to dispel stereotypes that assert the desert as a barren, solitary wasteland. More so, they aim to reimagine it. “I create a new mythos that places queer bodies within this landscape,” states the artist. “It undoes the image of the rugged, masculine individual on the road. People live in community with one another out there—the antithesis of ‘the lone traveler.’”
Through close observation and storytelling, Spector situates the overlooked ecosystem as a strange yet grounding network of characters, narratives, and spaces. So whenever it comes time for the artist to journey out West, the town of Valentine awaits, promising a new mode of existence and belonging.
