Thank You For Your Service?

"Thank You For Your Service?" exploring the intermixed realizations and emotions of lost potentials in the past, while finding new purpose.

“Thank You, For Your Service?” is a photographic creative project that explores memory culminating in frustration, anger, and violence, which led to emotional withdrawal and physical stress from my military service experiences. I work with 4x6 photographs taken on deployments during my four years in the Marines, utilizing collage techniques to express the fragmentation of self that is a result of these memories. These recollections are a view into goals never achieved, training for a war that I never saw, the transitional phase of being thrown back into civilian life, and the haunting regret and self-doubt while seeking new potential and purpose.

The collages are constructed with fragments from the textures and scenes soldiers are surrounded by -- weapons, fatigues, helmets, the desert. I create small and sometimes miniature scale works. It is an emphasis of not only a contrast in lack of control I felt while serving but the shame I feel in not being able to see what is considered the pinnacle of a soldier's duty: experiencing combat. This creates a sense of preciousness and materiality within me that reminds me that I did serve honorably. Second, the labor used in making these works serves, as a therapeutic way, to address and critique the hidden desires I wanted to experience, such as protecting my country through combat. I am using objects or photographs to create a sense of acceptance of those themes. The glorification of killing another human being and being a destructive force of nature that is regarded as a “warrior’s mindset” within this toxic military community.