The Vanderbilt family epitomizes the American story and ultimate failure: the astronomical rise to success and then the slow and gradual fall back to the land of the ordinary, the obscure, and the forgotten.  They mark one of the greatest crashes of an American dynasty, their fortune squandered and the remnants scattered up and down the East Coast.  I look to moments where history is retold, where people coyly stick their finger into the socket of American failure, continuously being shocked by the same story.  I find the chapters in our annals where an elite set of characters wields great power over the nation, governing through wealth, opulence, and grandeur. I commemorate and memorialize these events and characters, illustrating the connections between past and present, reinscribing them in the home as plausible but amplified interior decorations.  This domestic cloth collapses heroic portraiture and the barely standing effigies of the monarchy, managing the order between pattern and real space, and becoming the background of domiciles.  My work questions the authority of the people and organizations that dictate the way we live our lives, that declare our history and that have created our understanding of the world.