My work has always been focused around the process of recording history, the creation of narratives, and the blurring of fact and fiction. This series is conceptually based on the 19th century artist Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire (1834-1836). In this five panel series, Cole depicted the cyclical nature in which empires rise and fall, from savagery through civilization to decay. This is an idea he also addressed in his poems: imagery of storms, dead tree stumps, burning and vanishing landscapes serve as prophetic warnings about the transformation of the land in the era of Manifest Destiny.

Using his series as a starting point, my drawings and paintings bring Cole’s ideas into the contemporary discourse by examining the inevitability of social, environmental, and political decline. To reference the physical and cultural landscape’s transformation from savage state to Arcadian, consummation, destruction, and desolation, I have combined images hulled from personal travel photos of Rome, stills from the 2005 television mini-series Rome, 19th-century Grand-Tour paintings of Roman ruins and Mount Vesuvius, “tagged” portraits of actual emperors, and Hollywood celebrities as Roman emperors.