ARTIST STATEMENT
I am an artist, organizer, and Iraq War veteran, whose work seeks out moments of beauty, poetry, and connection, in order to construct new languages and meanings out of personal and collective traumas. I use these new languages and meanings to create projects that attempt to de-construct systems of dehumanization and oppression.
I was profoundly affected by having to unexpectedly leave college to deploy to Iraq as a truck driver with the 1244th Illinois Army National Guard in January of 2003. Within the first three months of my fifteen-month deployment, everything I understood about myself and the world crumbled, transforming my life.
After my deployment, I returned to the University of Illinois to study painting, where my work focused on deconstructing my experience in the military. I began to use art as a tool to confront issues of militarism and dehumanization. I created Dust Memories (2005), Ahmed (2006), Tourist Photographs of Iraq (2006), and Drawing for Peace (2006) during that period.
In 2006, I joined Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW); in 2007, I was a founding member of Warrior Writers. In 2009, I received an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University and became the national IVAW Organizing Team Leader (Organizing Director).
Since the beginning of my involvement with IVAW, I worked on art and organizing projects, including Warrior Writers, Combat Paper, Drawing For Peace, Operation First Casualty, Winter Soldier [video coverage], Demilitarized University, IVAW Field Organizing Program, Operation Recovery Campaign, War is Trauma Portfolio, and the March for Reconciliation and Healing.
I am currently working on an ongoing project, TEA. When someone sits, sips, and reflects over a cup of tea, a space is created to ask questions about one’s relationship to the world: a world that’s filled with dehumanization, war, and destruction; a world that is filled with beauty, love, and humanity.
ARTIST PROFILE
- The very symbolic return of veterans' war medals - in conjunction with the March for Reconciliation and Healing - during the 2012 Chicago NATO Summit; and
- Operation First Casualty, a war zone re-enactment in one of many major cities targeted for a performance by veterans who had returned from service in Iraq.