3MUSTANGS is a sculptural and media-based interrogation of institutional symbolism, image-making, and the instability of contemporary American mythologies. Centered around a distorted bronze reinterpretation of the iconic mustang imagery associated with Southern Methodist University, Texas identity, and American individualism, the work examines how symbols become shaped, stabilized, and ultimately warped by systems of bureaucracy, capital, branding, and technological acceleration.
Rather than depicting the mustangs as heroic or free, the figures appear inflated, glitched, compressed, and structurally unstable—as if collapsing under the weight of the very systems that attempt to preserve them. What was once intended to symbolize movement, resilience, and independence instead becomes a monument to containment: raw energy domesticated into institutional identity, legacy branding, and marketable spectacle.
The bronze sculpture is accompanied by lenticular prints, digital renderings, and process-based image studies that extend the project across both physical and simulated space. These companion works emphasize instability in perception itself. The lenticular images shift and fracture through movement, while the digital renderings expose the synthetic and algorithmic logic embedded within the sculpture’s construction—blurring distinctions between monument, artifact, simulation, and glitch.
Developed during Cleveland’s MFA thesis, Aesthetics of Real, the project emerged directly from lived experiences navigating institutional structures within higher education: administrative systems, financial abstractions, bureaucratic friction, and the strange contradictions between artistic freedom and institutional control. Even the physical production process mirrored these tensions—failed ceramic shells, material miscalculations, combustion, delays, and technical breakdowns became embedded into the conceptual framework of the work itself.
At a material level, grounding the project in bronze was intentional. Historically associated with permanence, honor, and public memory, bronze here becomes unstable—used not to stabilize mythology, but to expose its distortions. The work asks what happens when the symbols designed to represent freedom begin to reveal the systems that constrain it.
Like much of Cleveland’s practice, 3MUSTANGS exists between sincerity and satire, monumentality and collapse, permanence and mutation. The work captures institutional mythology mid-distortion—where symbols no longer fully hold, but have not yet disappeared.
