This installation propagates concepts of the American Dream, current and historical. Each candy-colored tricycle is a visualized jingle of “faux” materials commenting on American hopes, dreams and failures, and the“Trykes” are all adorned with pretty little flags of the past, present, and future. The Betsy Ross flag or “Founding Father’s” flag is on the pink tryke titled “My America: It’s a Boy!,” acknowledging the current political paternalism and the ongoing battle over constitutional intentions and whether our founding “fathers knew best.” “Manifest Destiny” is the yellow tryke bejeweled with Monopoly houses and hotels. This flag will be our future American flag if another state is added to the Union. The baby blue Supergirl tryke has our current flag erected in absurd alliance with the concepts of the piece’s title “America's Exceptional-ism”, a neo-conservative belief that what we, as in “US,” can behave differently than what we expect of others, or “them”. The mint green “Asylum” tryke flag is the “Sons of Liberty” flag, representing the current modern-day Tea Party, festooned with a motor-bike sized license plate exampled from the permanent resident identification, minus the photo, from http://www.us-immigration.com/replace-lost-stolen-green-card-Form-I-90.jsp Lastly, the orange “American Dream-cycle” is an entirely made up flag emblazoned with Hobby Lobby exploding star iron-ons, rising and falling, symbolically mirroring the chances of picking yourself up by your bootstraps and attaining the American Dream.

My tongue-in-cheek sense of humor is tapered with the use of self and family portraiture in each of these five large-scale sculptures. Each piece is made up of my family: my immediate family, my three living siblings’ families, and my mother alone. The shadow silhouettes are cut from home DIY building materials, “faux” or stand-ins for “other” materials. The materials include vinyl flooring mimicking a hardwood floor, rubber floor mats with a fake rock pattern, Astroturf, cracked ice light fixture covers, vinyl “wood” printed siding, and faux stucco wallpaper. Each family also expresses a real aspect of the natural world such as trees, rock, grass, water, and sky. Both the real and fake stand-ins comment on the questionable nature of our current reality, relating to contemporary politics, consumer culture, and popular culture. Why do we live in a world where we make cheaper materials to look like other materials when it is plain to see they are false? Why pretend?