Rancho is a series of dreamlike animal portraits set within an imagined American West. In collaboration with photographer Milano Liberi, conceptual artist Robin Huber integrates photographic elements into meticulously crafted cinematic tableaux. Many of the animals were photographed at Rancho Partida, a P.R.E. Andalusian ranch in Riverside County. Other elements arrive from afar: a mountainside in the French Alps, a stretch of sky over Upcountry Maui, all folded into a single invented landscape. Like the operatic visions of Sergio Leone, Rancho’s West is pure fiction, an enchantment of longing and imagination more fairy tale than Western.

Each work is conceived as a frame from an unwritten film. A newborn foal stands at the threshold of a vast desert, poised between innocence and destiny. A rooster surveys his domain with the gravity of a tyrant. Beneath immense blue skies, familiar ranch animals assume the stature of legendary figures. Intimate and monumental, Rancho’s magical West evokes histories and futures far beyond the frame.

Many of the works are produced at life scale, presenting the animal as a sovereign presence beyond the picture plane. Each work is a window into a consciousness we sense but never truly enter. Fully alive, fully present, these animals watch us with the same wonder with which we watch them, without language to close the distance between us. Rancho asks what we owe that aliveness, once we have truly seen it.
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About the artists:
Robin Huber | Milano Liberi