Leah Oates: Your images deal with working-class people and environments in the United States, and have a melancholy side to them. How did you come to this theme in your artistic practice?
Me: The working-class people, as you refer to them, the workingman is the victim lab rat of this great experiment called America. America is founded upon a man at the top of the pyramid shitting in a bucket and then handing it down to the man below him, then that guy shits in the bucket and hands it down to the man below him. As each man takes his turn shitting in the bucket and handing it down, it eventually reaches the man at the bottom and that is the workingman. The workingman is given a bucket of shit filled so high that there is no room for him to shit, and no one below him to hand the bucket down to, so he is stuck with it. He has no other option or choice, and he is forced to eat and deal with everyone else’s shit, everyone else’s mistakes, failures, miscalculations, and selfishness. And, well, that ain’t cool with me. This bucket of shit or perhaps a nice way of referring to it is the trickle down society we have built our politics and economy on, doesn’t work for everyone, and problems can’t just be pushed downward, swept under the carpet and forgotten about. It takes Americans the absolute worst to realize that there is problem, and usually at that point the pile of forgotten problems under the carpet have become so big that the carpet looks like the tiny white snow cap on top of a mountain. And by then it is too late.
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