Dead-End Economies explores the intersection of personal trauma and the commodification of military service. Drawing from Kenneth T. MacLeish's Making War at Fort Hood, the work examines how military recognition, medals, awards, and honors lose their intended meaning through bureaucratic transactions that often leave service members with mere remnants of recognition. Medals meant to symbolize valor and sacrifice are frequently logged unceremoniously into soldiers' files. If a soldier wants a physical object, they often must purchase it themselves. These hollow gestures stand in stark contrast to the profound and lasting effects of war, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

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The series uses cyanotypes on cloth, incorporating rubbings of the medals I earned and fragments from Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) worksheets. CPT, a treatment for PTSD, helps individuals process and reframe traumatic events by dissecting them into three parts:

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• Activating Event: "Valor" and "Commodity"

• Belief/Stuck Point: "Victory" and "Currency"

• Consequence: "Sacrifice" and "Cost"

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These six embodied words anchor the work, juxtaposing the language of therapy, a deeply personal, internal process, with the dehumanizing commodification of military recognition. The cyanotypes are displayed in military medal presentation boxes that mimic the visual language of honor but invert its meaning. Where these boxes traditionally signify achievement, here they hold fragments of psychological reckoning and unresolved trauma.

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A small trash can placed beneath the artworks holds discarded medals, evoking the moment in MacLeish's book when they found a box of Global War on Terrorism Service Medals in a dumpster. These medals, created to honor service, had been reduced to garbage, a striking metaphor for the dissonance between the lofty ideals of military recognition and the devaluation of the individual experiences they signify. This addition underscores the system's disposability, where it throws away symbols of sacrifice, mirroring how society trivializes or ignores service members' struggles after their utility ends.

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CPT's structure mirrors the repetitive, transactional systems of military bureaucracy. Soldiers returning home carry PTSD, survivor's guilt, or traumatic brain injuries as lasting remnants of their service. Therapy becomes a lifelong process of revisiting and reframing these experiences. The medal boxes' rigid compartments evoke the mental compartmentalization required to survive both war and the civilian systems that fail to address its aftermath fully. 

 

Through this juxtaposition, Dead-End Economies confronts the disparity between the fleeting, impersonal recognition given to service members and the enduring psychological impact of war. The discarded medals beneath the artworks starkly remind viewers of this imbalance, while the CPT fragments insist on the humanity the system fails to honor.

 

The work reframes the military medal as both artifact and metaphor. It invites viewers to confront the systemic failures of the notion of honor and sacrifice. It emphasizes how medals, whether discarded in dumpsters or tucked away in drawers, symbolize valor rendered disposable while the psychological toll of war endures. The material remnants of service, whether medals or memories, become sites of contradiction, representing both hollow gestures of recognition and scars of war that refuse to fade.