These carved wood sculptures, I reflect on the meaning and purpose of archaeological artifacts, distorting the messages intended for future generations. Through intertwined forms, mismatched proportions, and deliberate imbalances, I contemplate complexities of human experience—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and conflict—merging opposing perspectives within each work. The intentional misdirection considers the effort required for honest self-reflection, while the deliberate, uncomplicated marks from chisels and hand tools emphasize the imperfections in the wood and joinery, commemorating humanity’s flaws. By crafting playful yet deceptive objects, I aim to obscure straightforward interpretations. This project addresses themes of ancestry, shared history, and revisionism, challenging the ways we perceive and decipher our inherited narratives and collective past.

I maintain that you can hold and believe opposing perspectives and truths in your mind at the same time. It may look one way but it may be the other: Grab, push, pull, embrace, struggle, desire, revulsion, conflict, share, heartache, guilt, shame, challenge, confrontation, aggression, affection, clash, combative, touching, adoration, lust, passion, yearn, tenderness, infatuation, admiration, clasp, feel, connection, coupling, menace and all psychological concerns.

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, tell tales of life, death, love, friendship, war, peace, sex and freedom. What is the legacy of contradicting ideologies in education and culture? How can we reconcile a dangerously forgetful history? Who knows what are the right questions to ask?

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.