Operational Drift is a series of wall-based textile works examining how authority and ideology continue to function as coherence erodes. Using fabric, mass-production aesthetics, and AI-generated hallucination, the work treats media saturation and disinformation as structural conditions rather than exceptions.
Project Statement
These pieces are built from printed fabric, sewn joins, and accumulated surfaces. They borrow the visual language of marketing, tactical branding, and platform-driven image circulation, where repetition replaces clarity and volume becomes a substitute for truth. In this environment, scenes of enforcement, protest, and intimidation can be endlessly replayed, reframed, and contested until accountability dissolves.
The Process
I work primarily with fabric and sewing because textiles carry a double history. Cloth is intimate and domestic, tied to care, repair, and everyday survival. At the same time, textiles sit inside global supply chains often sustained by the labor of immigrant women in garment and fashion industries, where skill, speed, and endurance are demanded while workers remain undervalued and unseen. In these works, sewing becomes both structure and meaning: a visible record of joining, mending, and holding together what is politically and socially coming apart.
I use Direct-to-Film (DTF) and direct-to-fabric printing to keep the work close to the look of mass production. This matters because contemporary power is frequently packaged and distributed through the same visual systems that sell products: clean slogans, repeatable icons, and attention-grabbing spectacle.
A Note About Generative AI
AI image generation is a deliberate part of the process. I am not using AI to invent certainty or produce seamless realism. I use it for its instability. Hallucinations, distortions, and broken anatomy become a visual analogue for the media ecosystem itself, where misinformation, partial truths, and conflicting narratives circulate faster than verification. AI error is treated as evidence of system failure and as a way to picture confusion, denial, and the normalization of harm.
MAGAAGAGAG
MAGAAGAGAG consists of a field of embroidered hat outlines scattered across a large red textile ground. Each hat bears a variation, mutation, or corruption of the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Some remain legible and familiar, while others drift into recursive loops, awkward permutations, religious invocations, patriotic clichés, grammatical errors, and eventually complete nonsense. The hats themselves mutate as well, shifting between baseball caps, cowboy hats, bucket hats, sun hats, and increasingly ambiguous forms, as though the iconography is struggling to maintain its own identity.
The work emerged from a deliberate experiment using a large language model to progressively degrade and destabilize political language. Beginning with a recognizable slogan, repeated generations introduced small mutations, allowing the phrase to drift away from its original form and into increasingly unstable territory. The process treated language as a system capable of producing endless variations that retain the appearance of meaning even as coherence begins to erode. Beginning with a recognizable political slogan, successive iterations introduce subtle changes: words are added, removed, repeated, reordered, or replaced. “Make America Great Again” becomes “Make America Holy Again,” “Make America Faith First Again,” “Make America Great Forever and Ever,” “Again Make Again Great Again,” and eventually phrases that collapse under their own weight. What begins as a coherent political statement transforms into a self-referential system that appears meaningful while conveying little or nothing at all.
This process mirrors the broader instability of the MAGA movement itself. Over the past decade, the movement has demonstrated a remarkable ability to absorb contradictory positions, shifting allegiances, conspiracy theories, religious narratives, and political grievances into a single symbolic identity. Its boundaries are fluid, its principles often situational, and its rhetoric frequently disconnected from policy, ideology, or objective reality. What matters is not consistency but affiliation.
Funny Papers
This large-scale paper and textile work was constructed from a reproduction of the United States Constitution, printed on fabric and altered through direct-to-fabric (DTF) printing, stitching, and acrylic paint. The original document—sourced from an official National Archives reproduction—remains legible beneath interventions that disrupt its authority and - one would hope - sanctity. Across its surface, the phrase “SEE YOU IN THE FUNNY PAPERS” is rendered in bold, irregular white lettering, recalling both comic-strip typography and dismissive slang for death or irrelevance. The phrase functions as both threat and satire, suggesting the erosion of democratic institutions into spectacle.
Materially, the work collapses distinctions between archival reverence and domestic labor. The Constitution, often treated as untouchable under glass, is reconstituted as fabric - creased, stitched, and marked - subject to handling, wear, and reinterpretation. The addition of a vintage cartoon child figure further complicates the image, introducing a dissonant tone of innocence and nostalgia that clashes with the gravity of the text. This juxtaposition underscores how media, myth, and national identity are co-constructed through both official documents and popular culture.
The piece reflects on the fragility of democratic systems in the face of political disregard. By layering humor, violence, and degradation onto a foundational text, the work critiques the current administration’s erosion of the rule of law and highlights the transformation of governance into spectacle, where legal frameworks are treated as disposable and public discourse is mediated through distortion and trivialization.
Cloud Support
Cloud Support considers the contemporary promise of “support” as something increasingly abstracted and outsourced: cloud infrastructure, remote oversight, outsourced moderation, and the distance between decision makers and the people who experience the consequences. The work uses the soft language of comfort and assistance while staging a visual field that feels unstable, saturated, and difficult to resolve.
The textile surface acts like a screen that has been made physical. Layers of printed imagery and stitched seams hold together a picture that refuses to cohere into a single narrative. This disorientation is intentional. It mirrors how institutional power can appear omnipresent and authoritative while operating through partial information, misrecognition, and denial.
As a fabric object, the piece also points to the material underlayer beneath “the cloud”: extraction, logistics, labor, and bodies. Softness here is not comfort. It is a warning about how easily care language is used to mask systems built on distance and control.
fire drill
fire drill is a Direct-to-Film print on satin that stages a chaotic cluster of SWAT officers suspended between black and tan armored vehicles and a military-style transport truck. Rendered in an anachronistic, comic-strip aesthetic, the figures appear exaggerated and slightly absurd, as if caught mid-spill or mid-misstep. The satin surface heightens the artificiality of the scene, giving the militarized imagery a slick, theatrical sheen.
The work deliberately merges state and federal enforcement iconography, collapsing distinctions between jurisdictions and suggesting an expanding, entangled apparatus of control. The comic style functions as both camouflage and critique: humor and visual exaggeration expose the instability, confusion, and overreach that often accompany heavily policed spaces. The swarm-like clustering of officers implies rehearsal without clarity, action without direction—a “drill” that appears perpetual.
Beneath the slapstick surface lies a historical undertone. The uniformed bodies, armored vehicles, and tactical branding evoke institutional lineages shaped by racialized control and exclusion. The work hints at the persistence of white supremacy embedded within the histories of American law enforcement, suggesting that the spectacle of order frequently masks deeper structural inequities. By pairing absurdity with militarized imagery, fire drill exposes the tension between projected authority and systemic confusion.
Charlottesville, 08.11.17
Referencing the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, this work examines how overt racism and bullying persist through public ritual. The marching crowd becomes a collage of humans and monsters, a way to visualize both the ordinary and the grotesque within collective intimidation. Torches are rendered as props of spectacle, turning violence into performance and participation into choreography.
The monument at the center functions as a condensation point for mythmaking. It is not only a symbol to defend but an image to circulate. The work points to a societal failure that is not subtle: repeated condemnation has not prevented repeated reappearance. The march becomes a loop, a ritual that returns because it remains socially and politically permitted.
Printed on fabric, the scene takes on the logic of a banner or flag, suggesting how ideology moves through portable, reproducible surfaces. The softness of textile is set against the hardness of the spectacle, implicating everyday culture in the conditions that allow intimidation to endure.
Demons
Demons is a portrait of a duplicitous pseudo-religious figure addressing a crowd of humans, demons, and monsters. The work draws on the visual grammar of revival tents, patriotic pageantry, and staged persuasion, where belief is performed and sold. The crowd is rendered as a mixed assembly, suggesting the porous boundary between the human and the monstrous when power is absorbed as entertainment.
The figure functions as an allusion rather than a literal portrait, pointing toward charismatic political performance and the merging of religious affect with political loyalty. The work is less about one individual than about the social conditions that make the sermon persuasive: spectacle, repetition, crowd energy, and the normalization of contradiction.
Fabric becomes a charged support here. It evokes both banners and domestic cloth, linking public persuasion to private life. In this way, the piece traces how ideology travels from rallies and screens into everyday relationships, habits, and language.
Four
This piece responds to the deployment of chemical irritants by ICE in Minneapolis and to the broader optics of militarized presence. The figures appear tactical but unstable. Bodies fragment, mutate, and dissolve into green plumes, as if the scene cannot hold its own narrative together.
AI hallucination is used here as a material strategy. Visual error, broken anatomy, and improbable surfaces are employed to suggest disorganization and befuddlement, the impression of authority performing control while revealing incoherence. The hallucinations also point outward to the media environment, where images of force are repeatedly circulated, clipped, reframed, and debated until they become less a record of reality and more a site of competing myth.
The gradient field reads like a backdrop built for display, echoing the aesthetics of branding and staged optics. Printed and fixed onto fabric, the work sits between banner and evidence, asking how images of harm become both consumable and forgettable at the same time.
Minneapolis 01.07.2026
Minneapolis 01.07.2026 is constructed from printed fabric panels sewn into a single field, echoing both the logic of montage and the labor of patchwork. The work re-presents a public event through fractured, repeated viewpoints, pointing to how violence is now experienced through an accumulation of angles, clips, screenshots, and commentary.
Sewing is not only a structural decision but a conceptual one. Seams mark the joins between competing narratives and the attempt to reconcile what cannot be reconciled. The work’s domestic method contrasts with the imagery of armed presence, asking how fear and authority enter daily life through images that circulate relentlessly.
By combining fabric, stitching, and AI-generated visual instability, the piece examines the churn of the media ecosystem around state violence: an overabundance of imagery that promises transparency while often producing confusion, mistrust, and narrative drift.
Availability and Installation
All works are wall-based textiles and can be installed using standard hanging hardware. Please contact me for a checklist, high-resolution images, and installation notes.
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