My art questions our social values in unique and unexplored ways by recycling trash into art pieces. My art is conglomerate of mixed media: ink, marker, pencil, acrylics…and, of course, trash. I use chopped up junk mail squares, discarded can food labels, cigarette butts, and even dirty money. I juxtapose images onto my trash “canvases” in exploring visual metaphors to bring awareness to our shared, universal treasure – our Earth. Subjects vary from symbolic to word play but all are created onto trash. I am actually more intrigued with the process of gathering the trash and the different textures of the trash than the actual images that I put on top of the trash. It was a very sobering process to walk along roadsides and gather all of the cigarette butts and then take them home and slice them open so they could be used in a more 2-dimensional fashion. When I think about all of the people that threw their cigarette butts onto the roadside I get pretty disgusted. " the Beautiful" is a very disgusting piece because of the whole process.