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When I first saw this book The World’s Most Daring Explorers, the first thing that popped into my mind was the phrase I scrawled on the opening spread: "A Little Known Treasury of Scalps and other lore pertaining to the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny, an underlying text of our nation." 

As my artist statement reads, "my work arises from the encounter of hand with matter—I work from the stream of images that flows through the body," I do not work from an exterior idea. By giving in to chance and by allowing unconscious feeling and language to come up, the results are more surprising; and, since this way of making art does not fall into the tedium of illustrating an idea, it can in fact, for me at least, be more healing. The main pitfall is that sometimes the work might seem illogical or "politically incorrect."

I had some artificial hair and rubber bands that I wanted to incorporate into a randomly chosen book, so I started by making some deliberately nonsymmetrical grids from the hair.  Then I felt a need to undermine and dislodge any reading one might make of the text about scalping, so I added grids made of rubber bands. Much of my work seems to be driven by a need to make subversive jokes about logic, which I personally associate with the patriarchal and scientific worldview that has brought us to eons of continuous war—which itself seems motivated by a need to display technical prowess, experiment with weapons on people, and by a need to act out the doctrine of "manifest destiny," not to mention "taking up the white man's burden," as Kipling put it, in order to justify our human greed and aggressiveness.

I then became worried that by focusing on scalping, I had confused the sacred ritual of scalping that was practiced by the indigenous people of North America with our western materialistic acts of war that come from greed for land, oil and other resources. Only later was I able to find and write in the margins the historical truth that while the colonial people did not introduce scalping to the new world along with smallpox and other diseases they brought, they caused the ritual meaning of scalping to be lost. In fact the earliest known scalping was in 400 or so before our present era and was practiced by the Scythians (a nomadic people of Southern Russia), who are ancestors of the Vikings, who had been among the first people to explore North America and therefore could actually have introduced scalping (though I know of no evidence for that). The colonial settlers did in fact undermine the sacred meaning of scalping by offering money for Native American scalps (including the scalps of Native American women and children). This in turn encouraged the indigenous people to scalp each other for monetary gain. This is truly an example of the commodifcation and alienation from meaning that occurs in capitalism.

A few days ago I realized that this pattern is endemic to US war policy, in that we go into countries that have resources we wish to exploit, and imagining ourselves to be making an unselfish attempt to introduce free market capitalism and other values of democracy, pretty much always cause civil war, and as yet unfathomed ecological damage and destruction of culture, because the inhabitants of the country inevitably become enmeshed in the money-making processes of the Western corporate machine.

I feel that I am beating this to death... 
Praise the Lord and pass the amunition!