In Seven Flags, Executive Order 13769, colloquially known as President Trump's travel ban, becomes intrinsic to a dialogue about power and national identity. At the heart of this conversation is the persuasive nature of language and its ability to affect how a chosen audience will think and act. The work highlights particular phrases within the ban, in an exploration of how the document constructs an American identity in opposition to a foreign Other. 

Seven Flags recognizes the authority attributed to this official document but equally asserts that its the very use of officialese that ensures the majority will never read it. The work recontextualizes the language of Order 13769 by placing it in direct conversation with the flags of these seven nations. Represented as physical pieces of paper, the language becomes the material of the flags, which in turn represent the lives of real people. Within the frames of the flag, the viewer's perception of the letters and words is altered. They merge to form a continuous, interwoven mass, and this process mirrors the anonymization of those addressed by the ban. 

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Pictured: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen