I created this piece circa 2013 in high school art class, using watercolor paints and colored pencils over a collage of scrap paper and newspaper.

The subject here is a mysterious young woman bearing suspicious resemblance to myself, like “Self-Made”. I think it’s yet another unintentional self-portrait.

A young woman dressed in red, white, and blue clothes wanders despondently through a mid-apocalyptic city. The rubble on the ground is made of torn paper shreds. The buildings in the background are cut from newspaper articles describing tragic current events. Fires rage on the horizon, and a gigantic five-pointed star, usually a patriotic American symbol, lies rusted and decrepit.

This piece expresses my growing hopelessness and pessimism about American politics as I approached an informed understanding of such things for the first time in my teenage life. The more I learned about my country and its impact on the wider world, the more its vast suffering and corruption weighed heavily upon me.

Like most other artworks I created during this time, this piece has been lost. My only record of it is this photo.