My America: Big Boy, Fat Boy, Q. Cassetti, 2013, Trumansburg, NY

I am working on a collection of images...freeflowing images of "My America" as you know. I find that symbols and corporate logos are coming to the fore along with those personifications of brand (Mayor McCheese, Big Boy, Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, Betty Crocker, the Android, etc.) and find them flowing into images of war and weaponry. It is wild when I let my brain relax to see which avenues it travels in...to scare me or amuse me...but to result in images. Yes, the symbols of power and position, of money and greed, of the ordinary and extraordinary, of rockets and robots, of artificial intelligence and artificial insemination all are fluid.

Today's insanity around women's issues from health, reproduction, ability to vote and those rights we hold dear--coming under question from the likes of Governor Ultrasound and the Cooch....really are disturbing and are beginning to filter into this unsavory illustration brew. As much as we hold ourselves as so superior, I find being an American these days pretty thin soup given the low level the national conversation decended. It is appalling that the silent majority is allowing a vocal group of radical conservatives make decisions for their wives, daughters, sisters and friends. And, that those women, the wives, daughters, sisters and friends have by their silence and inaction, have condoned the eradication of rights they do not value and will not value until they too have a reproductive issue or a voice to be heard...and have given away that right without any knowledge of what they have surrendered.

Off the soapbox, for today.