Worship Nothing. Return with Fire.
This series explores the deep juxtaposition of fantasy and anxiety, presenting them as opposing yet interconnected forces. The voice of fear, the sharp edge of dread, the terror of the unknown—these are not simply curses. They are ancestral warnings and intuitions passed through generations, gifted to us so we may craft stories more powerful than the ones used to keep us small. For centuries, it is through this intuition—despite oppression, fear, and pain—that women have survived, woven their narratives, and told the truth.
I choose to build a new ritual: Worship Nothing. Return with Fire. This is the ethos of my project—a mythic visual language forged in the contradictions of our American dream and its nightmare, its promise of freedom entwined with the history of servitude and shame. The work reclaims our right to fantasy not as mindless escape but as the practice of sacred contradiction, absurdity, and new myth-making. It proposes a new form of worship: not to any false idol of the state, patriarchy, or profit, but to the truth we carry in our grief, our terror, and our will to survive.
I imagine this project as a visual religion born from exile. The new rituals of our Americana—this invented folk religion—do not seek to save our country but to ritualize its ruin, its grief, its long history of objectification. The religion is built on the bones of the American dream, but re-enchanted through each act of contradiction and each fragment of fantasy. It is not rooted in shame, hatred, or the worship of violence and hierarchy. It is a mythic sanctuary where the absurd, the sacred, and the erotic coalesce in a landscape more honest than any patriotic myth could ever be.
In my own life, exile came in many forms. My body was exiled from belonging in a system that commodifies women while demanding we shrink ourselves to fit inside it. My mind was exiled long before that—censored, silenced, restrained by the fear of being too much, too loud, too alive. When everything burned—when every storm hit at once, when every person withdrew their hands, their eyes, and their hearts—I became the exiled, and then the reborn.
This is the myth of the one-woman city: a village where each fragment of my identity, each broken face and voice that was silenced, is resurrected as part of a living whole. Each of these selves, these ghosts, are my ancestors and my descendants at once. They are the sisters and daughters I have yet to meet, the elders I have never known, the parts of me that died too soon and returned to guide my hands. Together, we build a place big enough to hold our grief without shattering, a sanctuary that does not need permission to exist.
The work uses symbols drawn from American folk art, religious iconography, and the language of myth to create a new visual liturgy. The American dream lingers as a ghost throughout—its hollow echoes haunting every home, every city, every promise of freedom that came with a hidden price. But instead of seeking to resurrect that broken myth, this work proposes a new one: a cultural identity built not on the product, the object, or the shame of being alive, but on the ritual of contradiction and the necessity of fantasy.
Folk art was never meant to be made alone. But exile chose me first. So now, through this work, I make my own folk rituals, my own visual religion, piecing together a sacred language from the contradictions of my American identity. It is a living system under constant construction, a testament to the fact that the mind will always find ways to dream when the body is denied rest. Each image, each fragment, each symbol becomes an altar, a place to grieve, a place to remember, and a place to imagine the village we all deserve.
