I was born in Helena, Montana, in 1995—a place that is mostly white and Republican, with a strong nostalgia for Americana. When I left my hometown for the first time, I realized how much my view of America had been skewed, having grown up surrounded by similar people and ideas. The stories I heard in school and museums offered a sanitized version of America’s brutal past (and present).

Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset uses large-format photography, Polaroid, Super 8, collages of my photography, and a mixed media approach to critically examine the embedded and ingrained violence and aggressive performative masculinity in the fabric of American life. This violence is reflected in personal collages (bars and churches), architecture, the paving and use of land for the transportation of commodities, and the iconography of the people idolized in society. The sense of the sublime, once celebrated in historical paintings that glorified the West, now feels like hell. Not because our John Wayne ‘heroes’ have run out of bullets, but because this is what remains of a landscape that has been burned, sold, and paved over.