This 2015 installation responds to Frederic Edwin Church’s Syria by the Sea (1873), a Romantic painting steeped in both aesthetic grandeur and imperial nostalgia.

Reinterpreting Church’s vision through the lens of contemporary geopolitics, Leaving the Forest reflects on the enduring shadow of American foreign policy—its cycles of intervention, hesitation, and unintended consequence. At the center stands a doe, poised before its own distorted shadow. It is gagged—or muzzled—depending on how the viewer reads the restraint. A muzzle suggests imposed silencing; a ball gag, a more complicated, possibly self-inflicted muteness. One implies victimhood, the other complicity. Either way, the figure cannot speak. The installation asks: who has the power to speak, and who is silenced? What do we project onto others in our efforts to “help,” and at what cost? In a moment marked by political ambivalence and moral fatigue, the silent doe becomes a stand-in for collective uncertainty.