prayer rug, 2016, 63 x 48 inches, Military ribbons of 120 countries.

This work explores the intersection of two of humanity’s most powerful institutional forces: military authority and religious devotion. By constructing a prayer rug entirely from military ribbons, the piece reconfigures symbols of state power and hierarchical achievement into a form traditionally reserved for spiritual surrender and sacred space. In many cultures, the prayer rug is a revered object that marks a threshold between the mundane and the divine. By merging these distinct iconographies, the work examines the tension between the external discipline of the state and the internal discipline of faith. It subverts the original function of these industrial, mass-produced markers of rank, inviting a reconsideration of how ideological and symbolic weight is assigned to objects.