Latest Work: Society Series

My current body of work, Society Series, focuses on American culture and uses aluminum cans as a medium of expression.

On the surface, American culture can be viewed as flamboyant, capitalistic, and wasteful. This can be reflected when we see how people consume and how they waste. The people who throw cans away are the richest in society. However, there is a whole sector of individuals who collect cans to make a living. Those people are the very ones who are the most vulnerable. They are the people who are thrown away by the general public—the mentally ill, the unemployed and for whatever reason, the unemployable.

As cans change hands within this process, the rich and the poor are united in a cycle of waste, that essentially becomes a cycle of rebirth and unity.  Externally, the can is a vessel for industry rivalry, consumer preference, and overconsumption, but when the individual pieces of the cans come together in my art works, they create a richer whole that embraces the beauty of unity and diversity.