 This is my piece, Fallen Bierstadt, from 2007, and it was funded through a grant through Campari, which the Brooklyn Museum acquired the piece, which I was very excited about. I live in Brooklyn. I actually live directly across the street, so out my window I see the Brooklyn Museum every day. So this is based on a painting called Bridal Veil Falls. The actual paintings in the North Carolina Museum of Art. I was interested in using the Bierstadt painting because early American landscape painting was important in shaping American identity, so I'm interested in this notion at the time of manifest destiny, this idea that as Americans we were destined to expand across the United States to the West Coast, and they often illustrated this or pointed it out in American painting, sort of these these incredible paintings of the wilderness and with this sort of divine light shining through the scene as if God was pointing us west. So I'm interested in those ideas and kind of reinterpreting them. I use that painting as a jumping-off point. I'm sort of interested in that era of landscape painting, and I repainted it myself on a canvas just by copying it, gritting it off and copying it from a picture in a book. The construction is made from foam core, which is if people aren't familiar with foam core it's sort of like cardboard but with a styrofoam middle, so it's supposed to simulate looking like it's made out of wood and the regular materials of a painting, but it's actually fabricated from foam core and paper mache, and then painted on top of. And even the debris on the ground is fabricated again from foam core and paper mache, and I know the conservators have been doing an amazing job kind of like keeping an eye on the pile of debris and rearranging it once a week to sort of look like I had put it there the first time. This is an example of early American landscape painting that perhaps was left out in the landscape for a hundred years and nature was sort of rearranging the painting to be a more accurate reflection of what's going on now. So I mean as an artist I was simulating these acts of entropy or you know maybe the painting went over the falls in the picture and kind of landed there and was was left to decay.