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 it into these tortured, impossible situations. They’re like a 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 very conservative community in the Bush II years, and the kind of gallows humor that’ll give you.

At the heart of it, 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 its inverse, and that’s a fascinating property to explore in the stories a nation tells itself.