Artist Statement
With Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, America’s war-damaged psyche went down into history. There it was buried, but, like so many Civil War soldiers, it was never laid to rest. Its aqueous memory, known today as The Lost Cause, still ruptures and rumbles beneath the surface of time, occasionally spilling out into grim national headlines.
This portfolio presents the ways in which I have, through visual language, confronted the vestiges of the South's antebellum culture. My work evolved as my country’s racial climate changed before my eyes, and I responded by studying civil war memory and its present-day ramifications. These paintings investigate my home country’s way of remembering the painful, internal conflict we call the Civil War.