I Shot

82.25 X 70.25 inches, colored pencil and graphite on paper

The name of each person drawn is someone from my childhood. The guns progress from old and rudimentary at the top, to increasingly powerful and militarized in the center, and finally to fictional weapons at the bottom, drawn from a video game and a cartoon. The sequence functions like a timeline, stretching from the earliest firearms through modern warfare and into imagined futures, as if violence is embedded in history, carried within each physical weapon, and projected forward endlessly. The visual patterns grow more complex as the violence escalates, following the Fibonacci sequence, an exponentially expanding chaos. Shots multiply in predictable increments, alluding to a sense of inevitability, while the repeated word “because” exposes contingency: each act depends on the last. It is incremental, like the boiling frog, where escalation is absorbed until it becomes catastrophic. The final line loops back to the beginning, closing history’s circle as I implicate myself.