"They Grow Up Fast: Students 1 & 2" explore via viciously loaded imagery the reality of child trafficking. The only archetype that universally elicits a more emotional response than imagery of children is imagery of children under duress. Kids are biologically keyed triggers of joy in the human psyche. The flip-side of that joy is primal sadness. "They Grow Up Fast" exploits these emotions via life-sized, animated neon sculptures of a male and female student each seated at a school desk. In a nearly real-time depiction of how frequently and quickly a child somewhere on this planet is plucked from the life she knows and thrust into a parent's darkest nightmare--each student becomes a gender-specific caricature of how trafficked children are most often exploited.

The girl--once donning a rainbow-print sundress, hair tied up in a bow--is alternately presented bare-breasted with her blue bow replaced by a disembodied hand tugging at a tuft of hair. The boy--arm raised at his desk, primed to answer a teacher's question, dressed in a t-shirt depicting a shooting star with a rainbow tail--becomes a ski-masked child soldier in a communist flag shirt with a grenade clutched in his raised hand. The pieces continue to perpetually drill this imagery into a viewer--over and over--every couple of seconds at the electronic mercy of a set of mission-specific neon control circuits.

Child trafficking is wrapped in candy colored, flashing neon light and presented as a three-dimensional cartoon tableaux. To a viewer, these objects are fantastic...unreal--they're not children. They're vulgar simulacra. What might be a tear-jerking clip from a Rwandan village in a UNICEF commercial almost immediately elicits laughter here at just another sick toy exciting our enchantment with technology and design. In a culture of un-ending wars, box-office-smashing films regaling torture, omnipresent porn, child beauty queens, grade school cosmetic surgery and sexting suicides--are we actually still susceptible to universal archetypes like sadness and joy or are we now merely trained to emote to news broadcasts, trending-topics and Save The Children commercials?

THEY GROW UP FAST - STUDENT #1 / GIRL ( NEON SCULPTURE )

THEY GROW UP FAST - STUDENT #2 / BOY ( NEON SCULPTURE )