Brent Holmes is dressed like a cowboy. He’s got the cowboy hat, the worn-out blazer and a pair of well-loved cowboy boots, mostly hidden under a sturdy pair of blue jeans.

The Las Vegas artist is at UNLV’s Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, presenting his latest exhibition, Behold a Pale Horse. In it, found objects and videos convey a message about Black identity, reclamation, isolation and the desert.

Leading up to the show, Holmes spent much of the pandemic exploring Nevada landscapes and recording that process. “It’s been a long time since the first time I really asked myself, ‘What is this place?’” Holmes says of the Mojave desert and Nevada’s desolate terrain. “There’s all sorts of whatever to unpack about what I’m doing, the performative statements. But I know one thing is definitely true—that this is a love letter to this part of the world.”

As the title—and Holmes’ attire—suggest, Behold a Pale Horse also focuses on the Southwest’s ranch-land history. Holmes, the son of Las Vegas entertainer Clint Holmes, has spent summers in Texas, where his family owns a ranch and raises cattle. “My mother would take me out there every year and show me my culture,” he says. “I had this very strong connection to my roots in the identity of the cowboy—and this is an identity that’s been denied.”

Holmes uses his art to reclaim that identity and send a message to the rest of us: What do you do when your history has been erased from all discourse?

“If you look at historical records, ‘cowboy’ is a term for a slave that tends to cattle,” Holmes says. “In the beginning, cattle ranching was done by enslaved people. Many of these skills were taught by African people. The culture and the look and the skill sets are as American as jazz.”

In the 2014 piece “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” a home video of a Holmes family barbecue runs as racially inflammatory audio from anti-government cattle rancher Cliven Bundy plays over the film.

Holmes explains that not all of Beyond a Pale Horse is meant to be taken as seriously. “You can do really meaningful performance work and laugh at the same time and be silly and be a clown about it,” he says of a second, untitled video piece that shows him riding a horse through the desert dressed as a cowboy, burying himself in sand and, eventually, turning into a mermaid. “You can still have the same meaning without taking it so seriously, because not everything is rolling around in blood naked.”

A triptych of found wood and personal heirlooms anchors the show, telling a story about Holmes’ family lineage and his admiration for Nevada. “In these objects, there’s a dialogue about environment, about the history of the place you are in and reconciling that with your personal history,” he says. “That, in many ways, is how we form our identity.

“In our nation, generation after generation of white men have installed ideas and myths about radical individualism, about their own superiority, about their lack of dependence on others and their sense of personal freedoms—all of these falling in line with the classic cowboy trope,” Holmes explains. “And when we pull back that veil, they become unsettled.”

In his videos, Holmes juxtaposes neon and gold leaf with rugged forms of wood and steel makeshift roulette tables and giant, Binion’s-style horseshoes, connecting the past and the present, reconciling ugly truths and asking how we move forward.

“There’s this conversation about digging,” Holmes says of the metaphor for perseverance. “I have myself digging under the earth. I have myself in hot springs, in rivers, at the Salton Sea, at the ocean. … Where can you go after you’ve dug as deep as you can? Where can you go after you’re below sea level?”

Perhaps you end up a mermaid, as Holmes does in his film. Or maybe you turn that curiosity inward, toward introspection. Whatever the result, Holmes says, “if you want to keep exploring, you have to swim.”

Brent Holmes: Behold a Pale Horse Through April 2; Monday, Wednesday & Friday 10 a.m.-4 p.m. by appointment; free. Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, 702-895-3381. Holmes performs at the exhibit February 12 at 11 a.m.