Artist’s Journal:

The American dream: it’s the advent of blue jeans and mega churches and muscle cars….and so, so much consumerism.

It’s impossible to talk about the waste crisis without talking about America’s cultural influence on the entire world. There is no nation in the world that has managed to dominate pop culture like America. Its insatiable appetite for consumer goods has changed the entire world over the last 100 years. That same desire for shiny new goodies has permeated the global culture, taken root in every country. If you ask someone, “What does a rich person’s life look like?” in any country in the world, they will virtually all paint a picture of a rich American with many cars, a huge house, the newest tech gadgets, endless food, the newest fashion, and the biggest private jet. American fast food, fast fashion, fast cars, and fast money: these are the trappings of success.

I made this particular piece during the California wildfires in January 2025. Watching families flee their homes, driving into a hellish fire-red landscape, was terrifying. It was devastating to watch how global warming had been ignored—and was still being ignored in the middle of this enormous tragedy. I thought about the industries that had been polluting the ozone while creating goods that polluted the earth, all leading to this moment. All for the American dream.

Currently, we are watching as America slides deeper and deeper into a culture of denial. They seem so desperate to keep their singular vision of America alive that they will literally deny the existence of existential threats, even as they perish from them.

And consequently, the American dream is starting to lose its sheen. It’s beginning to seem like something forced, something faked. Something garish and unsettling and ghoulish. It’s disturbingly fascinating to watch how they would sooner turn to the dark ages before admitting that the American dream has been killing them all along.