If you have TikTok or Instagram, there’s a chance you have seen a Michael Rollins horse.
The LED silhouettes are mostly CGI renderings, sometimes live projections, animated into videos shot by Rollins. The outline of the horses emulate neon signs, glowing incandescently as they run against long stretches of Los Angeles highway, above liquor stores, or alongside the humans oblivious to their presence. Online, everyone can see the horses.
The comment sections on his videos are filled with conjecture; hundreds of people argue about what the horses represent, bring up other horse-themed media, like Deftones, ‘white pony album’ or Bojack Horseman. Some people share memories, referencing relationships: ‘she chases you, then you’re left chasing her,’ one comment reads.
“This spoke to me on such a spiritual level. Much like the horses, we humans march infinitely forwards towards our idea of a better future. One always in front of the other. Yet, even still, some tread their own path above the rest. The horses are racing and so are we”. Read another comment.
Rollins decides where to put the horses based on what catches his eye. The graffitied side of a building, elevator doors, hotels. “My thought was to alter that space just enough, the smallest amount possible, to kind of rupture people’s perception and kind of make them take a step back.” People across the internet have connected to his vision of the world, filled with neon horses,
“I think it’s wonderful that people are seeing that connection on a personal anecdotal level, on a cultural historic level … I love the personal comments and the personal interpretations, because that just means that people are feeling it at a base level and at a primal level, which is fantastic.”
It’s not the kind of impact Rollins was expecting to have, or even the kind of project he intended on producing. His emphasis was originally on the more tactile and traditional arts: “I got my master’s in drawing and painting, did a lot of sculpture and stuff during that time in undergraduate too.”
About 10 years ago, he decided to start making flip books, and by the end of graduate school in Long Beach, he was making animations. “I’m in the land of motion pictures and Hollywood, and I’m ending up now in video. I’ve been lured into that medium.”
Rollins took his inspiration from two distinct kinds of horses: the original motion taken by Eadweard Muybridge, a series of eight to twelve cameras placed along a track. The horse’s legs tripped a series of wires connected to electrical shutters. “He captured the horse and the rider, and that also settled the debate at the time of ‘does the horse ever completely leave the ground all four legs at the time’. It was heavily debated because we can’t perceive that with our eyes. So that always stuck out to me in art history, even as a painter.” description.
He also took inspiration from cave paintings, some of the first images of horses ever made. “That image is connected back from the first motion picture to the cave,” Rollins explained.
The horse has long been a charismatic figure throughout media and literature, explaining why it has become the anchoring image for the project; previously utilitarian, horses have now become a symbol of a life left behind: “it holds this other place, this liminal space … our society in a way has moved on, and I think there’s beauty and a heaviness to that, but at the same time, they’re still here, and we get to still enjoy them.”
Many of the comments echo the loss felt when the horse runs across their screen. One person wrote, “I like your art because of the interpretation I can put on it, as maybe an homage to the horses of the past that used to roam this land of the Tongva, Chumash, & many other tribes.”
Acting as a ghostly figure, the horses are often placed next to street art or traffic lights, telephone wires, contrast with the scenes of the present. With the horse, imagery of the past is evoked: a scenic western, a natural landscape we may not see again. The horses gallop alongside cars and atop signs, refusing to be part of the past, inserting themselves into scenes, ignored by the people unable to see them, but nevertheless still there.
Our modern-day landscape is not conducive to horses, or many other undomesticated animals. That progress we enjoy comes often at a cost, something Rollins is cognizant of and works to highlight: “the tides are rising, and then in some ways the beaches are literally eroding into the ocean. So it’s like this binary that we’re all existing in, and this loss, but also this plenty, maybe like this like excess that we didn’t ask for”.
The artwork is not only philosophical for Rollins, it’s also personal. Rollins, who grew up in Arizona surrounded by sculptures and paintings filled with Americana iconography, took inspiration from his surroundings: “That cowboy energy is underlying and bubbling everywhere”.
Rollins hopes to bring the project to the physical world. He is waiting for the right time and place. He acknowledges the challenges that come with moving from digital to IRL.
“I feel guilty about when I see people asking, ‘Where can I see this? I’m like, ‘I want it to be real, but then I think that’s sort of part of the project now.
Rollins knows that recreating what he’s made digitally will be difficult: “Some of it’s impossible, right? And there’s a little bit of magical realism in the work, but I do want to”.
This step of the project is an inevitability: “I feel a responsibility that I haven’t before in my practice, where other people observe my work in a way they haven’t before.”
It is clear from his artwork that the meaning humans have found in horses throughout the years has remained. There’s something fundamental about our inclination towards the wild and free, which Rollins has captured with the neon horses that run through LA.
