Step into Petty Cash’s gallery at 114 Forrest Street in Bushwick, and you’ll find yourself surrounded by artist Justin McHugh’s All Cowboys Go To Heaven – a show that lands somewhere between an attempt at high art-assisted nostalgia and a Mojave Desert tourist trap. 

“We live in a post-cowboy landscape,” McHugh contends in his statement accompanying the show. “All Cowboys Go To Heaven is my eulogy to the cowboy,” he writes. 

While the Wild West aesthetic McHugh uses as his visual language has all but disappeared from the lives of the contemporary, working cowboy, it nonetheless remains very much alive in the American popular imagination. (For proof, look no further than the popularity of the “yeehaw agenda” on social media, in award-winning video games and in the fashion and culture of the mainstream country music industry.)