Painted in April (‘the cruelest month) for a show about the Four Seasons, representing Spring, at a time when our national anxiety seems to ever increasing, I paid homage to George Tooker’s painting GOVERNMENT BUREAU {1956] which as in so much of his work conveyed a sense of governmental inefficiency, social alienation, and dread.

America’s PRISON SYSTEM as a board game. 3D icons occupy each corner of the board: The Crack House, the Prison Tower, the Public High School and the figure of Blind Justice each stand in diagonal tension to the others. Everything is connected by money—or the lack of it—as symbolized by the laundry line of $100 bills. A player moves around the 365 chain links on the board by rolling dice and taking an orange card from the pile. There are two possible exits- one leads though a narrow gate to freedom while several paths lead to GITMO. Once a player is on the board, it’s very hard to get off.  Fun for the whole family!

Painted in the style of the art deco murals of Rockefeller Center, this work depicts the different ways in which water is wasted. Huge amount of water is needed for paper industries; large scale food and fuel crop monocultures; the hydroelectric plants, nuclear waste cooling systems; and hydraulic fracturing.  . Every year, 14 billion pounds of sewage, sludge, and garbage are dumped into the world’s oceans while the lakes, rivers, and the ground water upon which life depends are degraded by hazards of toxic pesticides. Mining chemicals, nuclear matter, and fossil fuels are also in the mix.

ACQUA PERSA detail: The figure of Poseidon perched on the Hoover Dam. Around the boarders are depictions of industrial water use, golf courses, plastic bottled water, and resulting droughts and toxic fiascos such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Statement from 2008: The Polar Bear has been the symbol for global warming since news about climate change began. Despite our culture’s love of things cute and furry, no meaningful reform of how we live on earth has occurred in private, public, or governmental spheres. There have been 14 meetings with the Conference of the Parties—and every single one has been a COP-OUT as ‘weather events’ and glacial melt continue.

The 43 cent postal charge for this stamp is an inevitability, but this also refers to the 43rd president of the United State who, while not alone responsible for this problem, has shown the most flagrant in his disregard for the seriousness of our man-made disaster. And so nature responds. The climate is changing because humans refuse to.