As American As Apple Pie
(2023) 28"x18", Mixed Media Sculpture
Inside the Work:
This piece was made in early 2023, at a time when public discourse in the United States was still largely invested in denial.
The prevailing assumption at the time was that the conditions that produced twentieth-century authoritarianism were behind us, that history had “taught its lesson,” that the symbols of that era were safely archived, defanged by distance and repetition.
As American as Apple Pie is not about the sudden appearance of extremism. It is about its quiet cultivation, how certain forms of hatred do not arrive fully formed, but are grown, patiently, inside familiar structures.
The wooden frame, a window. A domestic reference. The kind of windowsill where apple pies are set to cool—an image so deeply embedded in American cultural memory that it registers as benign, nostalgic, normal. What happens on the inside of that window is rarely questioned.
The American flag appears here not as a banner, but as a flower—organic, aesthetic, something tended. The point is not desecration. It is transformation. Symbols do not need to be destroyed to be repurposed; they only need to be reframed as natural.
The bottle, a vase. A support system. The kind of quiet infrastructure that allows growth while remaining invisible. Inside it sits the seed: not spectacle, not shock, but origin material. The ideology itself reduced to something small, portable, easy to ignore… until it isn’t.
The Nazi symbol is not invoked for provocation. It is used because it remains the most widely recognized case study in what happens when societies mistake familiarity for safety. Eliminating leaders does not end movements. Removing symbols does not dismantle systems. Seeds survive because the conditions that nourish them remain intact.
This work is both about a moment and a cycle. As American As Apple Pie is inspired by the mid‑century cliché of motherhood, windowsills, and small‑town safety typical of patriotic Americanness as a perfect host for extremism.
It was urgent in 2023 because the trajectory was already visible. It remains urgent now because the cycle has advanced, exactly as history predicts when enough time has passed for collective memory to soften.
This is not a work about shock or shame. It does not ask for outrage. It asks for recognition.
If there is discomfort here, it is not because something foreign has entered the frame—but because something deeply familiar has been allowed to grow unchecked, right where no one thought to look.
