Sacrifice / Souvenir. 2015

(Excerpt from an interview with Hill Street Country Club's Dinah Poellnitz)

And "Sacrifice / Souvenir”, where does this come from? 

Another overlapping thread. As it is my home and my community, I’m always in some sort of dialogue with Oceanside in my work. Oceanside is a military city desperately posing as a tourist destination. Every day driving to work I obsess on the millions of palm trees we have here. And I’m always pretty obsessed with our involvement in war, especially in Oceanside where avoiding it is impossible.

I’ve had those two words running around in my head for a few years now. Sacrifice and souvenir. What we give up and what we choose to take with us. The streets here are lined with palm trees to depict some mirage or oasis of freedom that these new recruits passing through here will take with them as a symbol of the thing they are fighting and dying for. Those trees fill the Oceanside postcards (and now instagram photos) so that tourists can remind themselves of that freedom feeling.  I’m fascinated by this kind of exchange of illusions, especially as to being an American. What creates the illusion of Freedom, why we need that illusion to exist, why we work our fingers to the bone and sacrifice our money and our children’s lives to keep it going.