silkscreen, etching, lithography, oil painting, legos, thread, mixed-media collage
22″ x 30″
backtrip emerged from a family reunion in the Texas panhandle. The landscape was marked by generations of agricultural history, including abandoned farm equipment slowly rusting in open fields. Many of the families who had spent generations farming the land were now participating in programs that paid them not to farm, creating a visible tension between tradition, labor, and change. At the same time, I was experiencing the trip through the eyes of my one-year-old son. While the landscape carried stories of work, history, and economic transition, he encountered it with curiosity, playfulness, and wonder. Layers of printmaking, photography, collage, toys, and attached Lego elements bring these perspectives together, combining personal experience with broader questions of place and inheritance. The work considers the ways landscapes hold traces of past lives and shifting identities. Rusting machinery becomes evidence of changing relationships to labor and land, while the presence of childhood objects introduces possibility, imagination, and renewal.
