I am tied up in a love-hate relationship with the American landscape and civilization. Middletown is the coal-dusted faces which are smoking cigarettes as they look at me and ask if I work for the government as they burn down their house so they don’t have to pay taxes on it any longer. Middletown is the Grandma who puts the delicate imported Ecuadorian rose perched in the porcelain vase in the fridge next to the cream so it lasts just a few days longer. Middletown is small town America under the cold florescent tubes of the box store that keeps the myth of the five and dime alive. Middletown is sweet and it is sour.

This work is a mix of melancholy and desperate hope. The work aims to capture an abstraction in close proximity to a reality. I portray the situations and objects that I encounter in my travels through middle America honestly and the viewer is left to endow them with a much deeper meaning. Middletown is an exploration into the cracks on the surface of the American dream.