Untitled (American Flag with Fence)

This work confronts the viewer with a familiar symbol—the American flag—distorted and obscured by the presence of a chain-link fence. The stars and stripes remain, but they bleed green, a reminder that in this country freedom is too often entangled with money. The fence is not simply a barrier of steel; it is the lived experience of incarceration, the wall that divides families, and the shadow cast over our democracy when profit is tied to punishment.

Here the flag becomes a contradiction: a symbol of liberty imprisoned by the very structures it claims to represent. The green bleeding through the red and white is both sickness and currency, marking the cost of a system that values control and profit over dignity and justice.

The piece asks us to reckon with a hard truth—that incarceration is not separate from the American story, but woven into it. Yet by forcing us to see the bars over the stars, it challenges us to imagine what might happen if we tore the fence away.