Without Man's intervention, a tree will spend its entire life in one location. It quietly records in each ring every triumph and every catastrophe that transpires around it. Like a tree, a flag is a collector: colored and stained by each victory and atrocity. 

Colorless, the United States flag hangs upon a stripped and amputated juniper branch, mourning the inescapable past while it contemplates a future free from unearned honor and the hubris of Man.

Half-Staff is born out of two simple gestures: 1) composing and 2) decomposing. Scraps of canvas are sewn together to resemble the US flag. A branch is cut from a tree, pruned, and debarked. They envelop each other and hang high overhead. With these gestures, I question how far an object can stray from its physical and conceptual source while retaining its original meaning. What makes a flag “a flag” rather than an expanse of cloth? What makes a branch “a branch” rather than a bit of wood? 

Is it color?  
Or origin?  
Or Maker?  

Somewhere in this gray area, within the inexplicable power of symbols, we will be forced to confront what it means to be a Nation. Half-Staff speculates that this power is not intrinsic but assigned.