I am focused on the underlying violent and self-loathing nature of the American social psychology by asking the viewer to see what they already see everyday recontextualized through the materials I use and the juxtapositions I present. I am asking the viewer to reconsider what we all too often are asked to scroll through quickly, going to the next breaking story, and the next, and the next ... I am questioning our own complicity in this respect, but not as an act of shame but as an act of self-empowerment. I believe that the sole project of art today is to live squarely within the realm of human emotions; art must allow us the opportunity to both heal and to see our own failings, where we have played a part. This process is not easy and it is often painful, and, as I said, it must include our own demons, our own complicity, our own failings; we cannot merely sit in judgment of others. I am asking us all to be more vulnerable, and in so doing experience our full range of emotions, because when we do, we would naturally, innately and unanimously reject and seek to improve the near total psychologically failed state of American society in which we find ourselves and in which we have been since the very inception of American nationhood.

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In my current hand-embroidered work I juxtapose similar bodily gestures as seen in groups of people during and after mass shootings with people crossing the US-Mexico border. I am presenting the similarity of the physical gestures of their pain and suffering. I am pointing to an underlying cultural truth of violence. I am seeking to bring this underlying cultural ethos to the forefront painstakingly for us to see and taste and feel, and not simply click away from as we do day after day, month after month, year after year. I get all of my images exclusively online from the endless news media bombarding us 24/7. My singular purpose is to honestly express this period in American history in its most exposed, violent and failed psychological state without irony, cynicism or any particular added level of intellectual depth or conceptual apparatus. I want us to stop and truly see it for what it is in a uniquely painful and honest manner, as only art can allow us to do. 

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I choose to work very specifically from Texas because Texas is the culmination point of all the extremes of American society that we both celebrate and are, perhaps, most ashamed of, always the antagonist to refined culture, always the most crass, the most banal, the most wanting and yet somehow the most honest, the most "American". We don't have the glitz of Hollywood or the gravitas of NY or the shine and sparkle of Miami or the history of Chicago or Philadelphia. Our beaches are ugly and forgotten, our cities hot and scattered, and somehow capable of feeling both urban and suburban at the same time; our landscape is flat and deserted and fenced and littered in stripmalls. Texas is where the brutal truth of Americanism is fully exposed in the endless loops of freeway seemingly going nowhere with the feeling that we are headed towards the very last stop on the proverbial American road trip. Texas presents the final and darkest frontier of a deeply conflicted, often hypocritical, often racist and xenophobic, often self-loathing and fundamentally violent American social psychology and yet presents a strange sense of brutal optimism and potential, a sense that you will be left alone here, but the eerie sense that this may also not be what you want. I am looking at this complex and often difficult mythology head on as the start point for understanding the deeply troubled heartbeat of the American empire.