This statement was displayed alongside this installation, which was my MFA thesis work, at the Ackland Art Museum:

Violence permeates our culture. We see it on the news, at the movies, and in our video games. The blood and gore we see is either reduced to a puff of smoke rising from a digital laser effect in a Star Wars movie, it is an over-the-top flurry of bullets and blood in Pulp Fiction, or it is simplified to a 15-second list of war casualties on the evening news report. The violence is either so sanitized that it no longer registers as real, or it is built up into a comic book rendition meant to simply entertain us.

Violence surrounds us, but for the most part, we experience it in the third-person. I count myself lucky to never have been victim or witness to anything worse than a schoolyard scuffle. For most of us in America, violence happens to “them,” not to “us.” From our position of privilege we feel safe in holding at arm’s length the daily stories of violence from the rest of the world, turning hurricane victims into a target for donations, or sighing sadly for the lives washed away in a tsunami.

In my drawings, paintings, objects, and the overall installation of the work, I create a space to contemplate the way I have experienced the violence in our world from a safe distance. The paper airplane simultaneously represents violence perpetrated by both Humans and Nature by looking like an arrowhead or a fighter jet while it acts like an insect or a bird. It is at once the gravity and horror of war and the mischievousness and freedom of childhood. Yet not a drop of blood is spilled in my paintings. Instead, candy-colored wounds and drips sanitize the experience and distance us from any real tragedy. In the end I am just playing with paper.