I grew up in Long Island, in a suburb outside of New York City. Long Island is decidedly not ‘the City’, and it’s proximity to New York City is not at all apparent. I lived in a Levitt-created neighborhood consisting of identical houses, flat green lawns and strip malls. Aside from some general population growth, Long Island was much the same in the 1980s as it was in the 1950s when my neighborhood was built. It was a very alienating place to grow up, as I never ‘fit in’ with the typical suburban mindset. I grew to despise the conformity, materialism and mind-numbing boredom that suburbia breeds. The pieces in the American Dreams series contain anonymous suburban images from the 1950s which represent everything that is wrong with suburbia, due to their generic sameness and their depiction of what I consider artificial happiness. The piece Red Meat/Surburbia contains such images as transparencies which are laid over images of typical “suburban” food (meat and potatoes and processed food) from Better Homes & Gardens and Betty Crocker cookbooks of the 1950s and 1960s. These cookbooks are suburbia personified in a book, in that the food depicted in much like the people in suburbia: perfect and processed.