"The state of the world is surreal.  This show is a commentary on the state of the world."

In the summer of 2024,  I was sitting at the top of a ridge in the Ozarks, one of the most beautiful places in this country, watching 360 degrees of fireworks in the surrounding hills while also watching Bisan Owda, a 25 year old artist, young woman, from Gaza, deliver her semi-regular daily update on the evets of the day during the first 9 months of the Isreal’s genocide against Gaza. 

She talked about having a cut on her foot but no food, water, or medicine to treat it. She was hungry and tired and somewhat in shock, and most certainly traumatized by the 9 months of continuous bombing all around her.

I was safely watching “freedom” bombs from afar while she experienced real deadly explosions all around her.

For 9 months I had watched with bated breath as young people desperately tried to reach anyone who could help stop the constant onslaught of bombs and tanks and bullets and falling buildings and lack of food, water, shelter, medical care, or  proper sanitation.  For those same 9 months I had been learning about all of the horrors happening all around the world, now and from antiquity, and contemplating how I could use my art to talk about it.  

The more I learned and the more I saw, the more I knew I could not return to my art in the same way I had approached it before.  I knew that the only way I could continue making art at all was if I used it to help change the world.

On one particular day a few weeks before the 4th of July 2024, some fresh atrocity caused me to actually holler out at “GOD” or into the void or at whatever might be listening,

“I can’t take it anymore! How can humans be so horrible! If God exists how can he sit and watch while humans turn each other to goo and dust! What the actual FUCK is wrong with people!?!”

Once i’d exhausted all I had to say,  I said “That! That's what I want to put into my art! I want to pour all of my anger and horror and empathy and passion and rage into my work! And maybe,just maybe, it’ll make some kind of a difference”

Immediately the concept for this show came pouring into my brain.

It was fast and furious as if something “out there” felt as much heartache and rage as I did over the horrors being committed in this world.  I scribbled notes and sketches for the next several hours and knew that I would produce this show. 

Part history, part prophecy, part current events, “7Days” is a set of giant “ancient” scrolls depicting the surreal imagery of our current dystopian reality wrapped in pastel pink and glowing fluorescent magenta. It is the culmination of 20 some years of christian end times rhetoric, 9 months of live streamed genocide being justified by bible verses, and a few moments of hollering at “GOD”. It is an effort to shine a light on the darkness ruling this world and a prayer that somehow we find a way to topple the systems keeping us all enslaved by the ruling class. It’s an attempt to convey the feeling of pretending business as usual while watching the world burn.  It’s the loudest scream I can muster that my voice might help awaken those who are asleep to the full scope of the insanity of our current reality.