Building with rammed earth is the one of the oldest techniques. Civilizations have historically relied on earth as an available material - it is durable, cost effective with minimal environmental impact.

How Much Earth is for Sale? is conceived as a monument, even for those with whom we disagree. We have become a nation of judgmental provocateurs, leveraging social media platforms to saturate the popular zeitgeist with superficiality, while evading taking responsibility on what’s at stake: access to justice, historical redress, environmental disasters, and racial inequity. We are spurring divisions and conflicts within our communities and households.

A staple of federal and state cases related to Native American land title for 200 years is Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. (7 Wheat.) 543 (1823). The landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court held that private citizens could not purchase lands from Native Americans. The legal result was that the only conveyances executing valid transfers of land title ownership with Native Americans were the one transacted with the Federal Government: creating a system of monopoly, annihilating free market-style biddings and enabling the acquisition of Native American lands at the lowest possible cost.

The home frame replicates that of a Monopoly board-game piece and the lines of the home painted in ‘warning and safety’ color orange.

With the abundance of mash-ups, fake news, and half-truths circulating, as a culture we can’t sort and evaluate the information we see fast enough to understand it. In response, I turned my research to archeological and archetypal symbols. History etched in stone is less mutable than its digital counterpart, though human behavior remains consistent. Throughout history we’ve seen the impervious systematic destruction of heritage by the power of ideological reasoning and self-serving political agendas. While the stories we have to guide us now are too tied to personal agenda to guide us, the ancestral truths and connective longevity foraged from our ancestors, the great migrations and the age of exploration, tell tales of life, death, love, friendship, war, peace, sex and freedom.

I have been examining the systematic destruction of culturally significant architecture and environments - attempts to destroy cultural heritage and the relationship to place therefore devastating familial history. My research has led me to the necessary protection of buildings and ecosystems during equally culpable historical periods of war or natural disasters and climate change. There is an opposition between scientific evidence and arrogant denial. The abstract use of sandbags function as a protection but also as a long-term symbolic representation of what they are protecting. Here, digitally printed wallpaper was made from photographing colorful variations of hand-dyed and sewn pink and orange canvas sandbags. They have the appearance of a theatrical backdrop behind a deep trench dug into the earth. An intentionally manufactured illusion between artifice and reality. I see these barriers having several functions depending on point of view: the wall serves as a physical environmental defense with a trench often used during martial operations; visitors can actively climb into the immersive trench including themselves within the protective barrier. Or, the colorful printed backdrop and hole create an out of place sense of imagined theatre. This project is on-going and to be created site specifically in other forms in outdoor environments and within interior spaces.

There is an interest in defining a period of our collective history and cultural understanding through objects of symbolic meaning used for ritual and cultural identity. While some objects have fetishistic qualities others are used for such reasons as fertility, worship or shamanistic idols. Exploring the vitality and power of primitive tribal art and the banal objects of pop culture are used to compress these apparently opposing elements into objects of meaning and humor.