These were abstractions of maps that I did when I became obsessed with aerial photos of satellite feeds on the Weather Channel. It was also 2002 and the war was still new to the media frenzy that surrounded it. I saw pictures of models in Paris Fashion Week in bondage gear and Mad Max army fatigues and it was odd to me that the combination of elite fashion and the War on Terror should be so casually combined. They seemed too far removed from each other. It got me thinking about how everyone was far removed from the war, and when I saw another map of Iraq with a bombing symbol on it being aired on the news, something clicked. How a yellow star could represent such atrocity was as strange as super models dressed in bondage burkas. Everybody on both sides of the globe or each culture, or whatever opposition didn't seem to know the real story. So I combined the images of women in burkas from news sites on the internet with the models in the bondage burkas. These paintings are about the cultural and media confusion surrounding the mess that is our involvment with the Middle East. It is in the context of a map, which shows that everything is either beautiful or representational from a distance.