The first work I made in which I recreated an artwork from art history was “Among the Sierras with Woodpecker”. Up until this point, I had been doing large paper-installations that made the gallery space look like it was in the midst of renovation. Around 2006, I was asked to participate in an art fair by my gallery and the fair didn’t allowed me to glue paper to the walls and floor, so I thought I’d make an artwork that I could then excavate in some way (instead of working directly on the wall, it was making a mediating surface). So I came up with an alternative idea that was sparked by seeing two images in The New York Times side by side: one image was of an Iraqi military graveyard with vehicles riddled with holes from gunfire and the other image was of an ivory billed woodpecker that was thought to be extinct but had been sighted in the South.