As a political activist and attorney, I have always been interested in issues of social justice. My work visualizes the enormous human cost of gun violence, war and injustice.

The works in this exhibition address the plague of gun violence in America. I didn’t set out to make this the focus of my practice when I completed my first piece on the subject in 2008. At that time, I failed to anticipate or appreciate the limitless avarice and selfishness of the arms industry.

However, the epidemic has metastasized to epic proportions. As gun violence – now the leading cause of death for our children – has transformed the experience of attending school from one of making friends and learning to an environment that incites terror in students and their parents, I couldn’t focus on anything else.

The Washington Post reported in September 2024 that more than 383,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. This figure does not include the indirect victims impacted by every incident – other students, teachers, administrators, families and friends. This figure also fails to consider the trauma inflicted on every child by the periodic mandatory active shooter drills, locked classrooms, and armed security guards patrolling their campus.

As the gun lobby and 2nd Amendment absolutists continue to insist on inflicting their priorities on the majority of citizens who are clamoring for common sense approaches to keeping our loved ones safe, my need to express my rage and frustration only intensifies.