Wood, model parts, three mummified mice, three wisdom teeth, american indian postcard, glass & paint
37.5" x 26.5" x 2.5"
$1,500

I built this mixed-media assemblage from wood, plastic, epoxy, and resin, layering in a vintage postcard image of a Native American alongside a plastic relief casting of Christ on the cross with the Holy Trinity, three mummified mice sealed in a small glass case, a strange old decal of a monkey flying through the sky, and a miniature sprawl of houses, junk, detritus, and fighter pilots, the whole surface patinaed green like worn copper or bronze. 

The title riffs on the nursery rhyme, which carries its own buried history—it's said to reference Queen Mary I's execution of three Protestant bishops who conspired to return England to Catholicism in the 1590s. That thread of religious violence runs quietly through the piece, echoed in the three wisdom teeth set around the Holy Trinity and in the three mummified mice themselves, given to me years ago by a friend and finally finding their place. For me the piece is really about the American landscape in the broadest sense: our strange, overlapping, often sordid layering of culture, faith, myth, and history, all of it pressed together into one surface.