America 101 could not have been completed without a lot of support. America101 is an installtion consisting of 100 paintings -- two landscape paintings from each of the 50 United States -- and a billboard printed from a paintings of a disposable water bottle. This installation is related to Pink and Green: 36 Views of Kamiyama. The artist physically visted all 50 states in about a year and a half to gather needed imagery for this project. She completed the painttings in her Seattle and Stillwater painting studios. Nature, that is the physical world that surrounds us, is an overwhelming concept for us as humans, especially because we are so physically small compared with our surroundings. In our contemporary world, we contain nature in many ways, one of which is to collect and enjoy disposable, mass-produced consumer goods that are scaled to us as humans. We allow ourselves to be seduced by these seeming necessities even as we environmentally ruin the majesty of our surroundings to create them. This piece is a contemporary critique of our uneasy relationship with nature – the project demonstrates our attempts to ignore what is large at the same time we focus attention on small impermanent disposables.  There are 100 very small (3” x 5” x 4”) oil paintings of the natural beauty of the United States, as represented by landscape paintings from all 50 states.  For this project, the artist has visited all 50 states and created paintings either on-site, or from photographs and drawings created in each state. These landscapes are painted on box-like wooded structures to have the uniformity of a mass-produced commodity. These small paintings are contrasted by a billboard-sized image of a common disposable commodity – the single-use, disposable water bottle. A ubiquitous commodity in a nation with pure drinking water at almost every tap, the very creation of the plastic water bottle takes three to six liters of water. Plastic bottles are a serious disposal issue in landfills, and it’s estimated a quarter of the bottle’s volume in oil is required for manufacturing bringing any given bottle to market. As the artist visited each state, and found landscape vistas, the sense that these areas would eventually be chocked with landfill was omnipresent. The selection of a water bottle also speaks to necessity of most forms of life – which includes the flora we find so attractive -- requiring water to survive.  There is irony in the fact that all places we go for natural beauty are dependant on this water (as snow, lakes, oceans, foliage, etc. etc.) that we are so thoughtlessly wasting.