Luca Maude Berkley (b. 1994 London, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist and drag king currently working in New Mexico. Their work revolves around imperialism, fantasy, and environmentalism in the contemporary American West. They are also the art editor of Contra Viento, a literary arts magazine publishing work on rangelands of the world. 

“Building off multiple years spent working on cowboy ranches, I struggle to reconcile my own love for ranch work and cowboy culture with the exploitative, white nationalist realities that even the most well-intentioned agricultural efforts can’t escape. After growing up in the UK, cowboying offered me a chance at an irrefutably American identity. My queerness, however, and the degradation of self that came from years of agricultural labor, lifted the veil on America’s idyllic agrarian fantasies enough to want to pursue a deeper, more critical inquiry. The weirdness of ranching and American ag is central to my work: photographs of flattened, otherworldly landscapes and anonymous animal bodies conflate lush, fantastical visuals of the US West with the conflicted, emotionally bleak world I experienced. Through drag, performance, and the creation of online personas like Jenn Deere and Piper Pelligrini I can mimic and ridicule the gendered, sociocultural world of cowboying. Yet despite the intensely critical elements of Jenn, Piper, and Jack Lope (who is America’s greatest cowboy, if you hadn’t heard), through them I am finally the cowboy I was never fully allowed to be. Even as my criticism of the US ranching industry drives my research and practice, the desire to joyfully, unthinkingly ride off into the sunset remains as strong as ever.”