"Promise" is one of several ongoing works investigating former Internee Toru Saito's description of the Topaz Relocation Center:

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Topaz seems like one big graveyard, a graveyard of broken lives, broken promises, and broken dreams. There are still many ghosts and spirits haunting the grounds of Topaz today. They hide in trenches and beneath the sagebrush. Unable to return to life as they once knew it, they remain prisoners of the decaying and rusting barbed wire fences.

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"Promise" reflects upon dislocation, relocation, and reconstruction. Using digital manipulation processes, the lithograph image is created with three separate images— one, a still taken from Dave Tatsuno's footage of the Topaz earth, the second an overexposed photograph of my mother taken in the 1980s, and third a still from a home video of myself as a young child wading out into a lake. 

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The front text of "Promise" deals primarily with the presence of water as prerequisite to fertility; a land that roots can take hold in. The uprooting of Japanese-Americans on the West coast during WWII worked to dissolve communities and identities.