Pity for scoundrels

My work is concerned with a kind of circularity. With goes-around-comes-around, with frustration and folly and fallout from run-ins on the road to Thebes. 

This current body of work explores the hubris of American machismo, ridicules the arch-myths of masculine conquest, and picks at the stupid knot at the heart of empire. I wanted to take this heavily freighted imagery - the Cowboy and all its attendant associations, and put them into these tortured, impossible situations. They’re like memento mori for anyone fool enough to think trying to run Rome 2.0 was a good idea. Call them an imprint of coming of age in a conservative community in the Bush II years, and the kind of gallows humor that’ll give you. 

At the heart of it for me, I think these are about myths and ideas that mean one thing at one time and come to mean their opposite. It’s dialectical; every idea implies it's inverse; and that’s a fascinating property to explore in the stories a nation tells itself.